Critical Writing Index

Request_reply. DM/2077. Dalibor Martinis

by Leila Topić, Aneta Barisić and Branka Benčić

Zagreb: Art Pavillion, 2016

ISBN 978-953-6890-69-9

Publication produced in conjunction with Dalibor Martinis 2016 fifteen-channel audio-visual video installation at the Art Pavilion Zagreb from March 18 to April 17, 2016. Includes several full-bleed colour in-situ photographs of the installation and three essays situating the work, two written by the curators, Leila Topić and Aneta Barisić, the third written by an independent critic and curator Branka Benčić.

"In the current moment, in an epoch of the total fragmentation of perception, the erosion of knowledge and of difficulties in the interpretation of reality, the post-human entity DM2077 has been created. It is a kind of digital representation of Dalibor Martinis - a virtual extension of the artist’s central nervous system, containing all the information about him who was formerly the artist known as Dalibor Martinis. The existence DM2077 is projected into the second half of the 21st century, to be precise, to 2077. The year was not picked out of a hat, for there are just exactly ninety-nine years from the first temporally conditioned conversation that in 1978 Dalibor Martins started with the hypothetical Dalibor Martinis of 2010. It is to this possible future entity that Martinis puts fifteen questions in the form of short experimental films shot in the last two years. The artist is primarily interested in what the answer is going to be while the question itself is actually less important. That is, the questions are transfigured into films - the vehicles of certain aesthetic values, but with a real performative dimension in the current moment.

"The films/questions cover a widely placed contextual framework: from the theme of self-referentiality, first person speech, social criticism or aesthetic reflections. The films/questions were shot at locations all around the planet: in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, in the USA and the Ukraine and Palagruža, for example. Inherent in each of the places shot is a question, or rather, the location is conditioned by the question. What, however, additionally captures the attention is the subjection of time as the fourth dimension of space. Every condition between the spatial coordinates and the temporal dimensions in the audio-visual installation Request_ Reply.DM/2007 freely floats and slides. (Quote taken from Leila Topić’s essay in the catalogue.) Catalogue edited by Dalibor Martinis.

ITEM 2016.050 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Dalibor Martinis