Review article
“Alien” Ontologies in New Artistic Practices
Luja Šimunović
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
The contribution explores the common tendencies of the practices of the younger generation of artists and collectives from Croatia and Slovenia (Neja Zorzut, Sara Salamon, MediumMovement collective and the duo Aljaž Rudolf and Eva Smrekar) who are connected by the conceptual actualization of “alien” ontologies. It is a question of conceptually, methodologically, and aesthetically heterogeneous practices that have as a common starting point the criticism of anthropocentrism, while explicitly relying on the speculative tendencies of philosophical realism and materialism in which human and non-human, subject and object are revealed as active and interdependent elements of a wider network of reality. Therefore, in the first part the text summarizes some of the key philosophical positions – those of object-oriented ontology, posthumanist and materialist criticism, and the question of the relationship between the human, reality, and technology. In this framework we observe how artistic activity acquires a special status as a causal, active field of research into the potential of the future and the actualization of alternative realities. We also consider the ways in which non-human or more-than-human subjects are articulated in the works as “alien” ontologies, and we examine the correlation with their inherent affective modalities of the “weird”, “eerie” and “uncanny”. These modalities are not necessarily associated with feelings of terror, horror, or discomfort, but seen as an aesthetic register that marks the liminal zone of reality and fiction, “inside” and “outside”, human and non-human. The aim of the text is to explore these philosophical, aesthetic, and methodological trajectories and to propose an “art of negative space” as a conceptual field applicable to a wider group of works and artistic practices both in Croatia and internationally.
Keywords
subjectivity; posthumanism; fictionalization; speculative realism; new materialism
Hrčak ID:
304963
URI
Publication date:
29.6.2023.
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