Perhaps this is why the military vocabulary is a good fit. The group of artists and cultural producers which launched it is forging an alliance with the galleries of the Coast and occupying the Monfort exhibition grounds. They will present works, produced in the last years by PiNA from Koper, whose authors are also members of this group, while the program at the same time facilitates the invasion of the other central producers of Slovene intermedia art.
Invasion, which brings to mind the entry of hostile forces, is also based on some quite too obvious facts of the present time, and a few of these facts will be interrogated by this year’s IZIS.
It is true that IZIS will invade Monfort, as it is true that this will constitute its first overview of exclusively intermedia art. To show an artistic practice that constructs its own tools from the invasion of technology and the latest scientific advances. Something that is perhaps not especially new for art in general, but in its confrontation with its more classical forms always at least partly pioneering. It is also true that IZIS will invade the height of the tourist season, the time of the notorious and welcome invasion of tourists. Into a place whose bet on seaside glamour very distinctly shows us that the words invade and invest are perhaps not completely coincidental.
And that perhaps the answer to fear inducing slogans of endangerment, invasions and their consequences – from the most volatile forms of capital to the rise of the most rudimentary walls – is invasion itself. Invasion as a defense line which should accept the endless coming, which should amidst the contemporary bustle and confusion as the most basic feelings of our time, think through this time and offer it to perception. To ask itself: what is ours, what is under attack, what should be defended, which border of our thought and perception is the one causing these feelings? And can art in its own way respond to actual and fictional threats, can it, if we let it stop us, if we let it invade, measure and offer a different characteristic of our time. Or at least the awareness that our confusion is no lesser than the one evocated by a more than a hundred year old poem by Constantine Cavafy Waiting for the Barbarians, which in Edmund Keeley’s translation ends with the verses:
“Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”
Our kind of solution is IZIS Invasion,
You are all kindly invited to join it.
Team of festival IZIS
PROGRAMME OF INSTALLATIONS:
5. 7.-26. 7. 2019
Saša Spačal, Matic Potočnik: Liminoid (Ljudmila, Laboratory for Science and Art, 2013)
You make me, disperse me.
With regards to the regarded I,
so much of self denial,
self
vaporization,
move over it through,
and all bonds anew.
Robertina Šebjanič, Aleš Hieng – Zergon, Ida Hiršelfelder: Time Lapse/Chemobrionic Garden (Zavod Projekt Atol, 2015)
Out of reach, the imperceptible take me.
Selfcombining structures, their breeze.
Their time breaks in here, to see another I.
Tilen Sepič: Light Oscillator (StripCore Forum, Svetlobna Gverila, 2016)
Just from circulation.
Pulse-reflection,
tremor-sound.
And the response
to the object-me.
Howling I see
my shadow
shining – singing.
2. 8.-23. 8. 2019
Gašper Milkovič Biloslav, Mitja Cerkvenik, Marko Turkuš, Marko Vivoda: Radia (PiNA, 2019)
The consequences of information radiation
are not imprinted by the inaccessible body.
Now the retina, straight
forwardly,
makes for me their forms.
Marko Vivoda, Karlo Hmeljak, Luka Frelih: Rear (PiNA, 2016)
The launched line engraving
More and more the outline of someone,
Lines you from the letter-shape,
a reflected barely perceptible
Pulse. Grows numb.
Stran22: SoapOpera (K01 M04 J01) (Svetlobna Gverila, Stran22, 2019)
Into a fluxing membrane,
safe in its wonder,
yearning for so much
beauty, so fragile
an illusion, when it bursts.
Andrej Koruza, Jan Krmelj, Gašper Torkar, Nika Erjavec (DivinaMimesis): Not a trace (PiNA, 2017)
»We must live life as a secret. Unspeakable,
unspoken. Communicate through misunderstanding,
what we left unsaid. Freedom is there:
It leaves
not a trace.«
Jan Krmelj
Miha Erjavec: Nano-grafitti (KID KIBLA)
The invasion of ever smaller things.
Spot, tag, stop …
Naked eyes on edge,
Take a hit to measure,
as the sole –
to whisper: you’re not it.
Production: PiNA
Coproduction: Obalne Galerije Piran, Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory, projekt Atol Institute, Lighting Guerrilla , Prostorož, Sploh Institute, KIBLA, DDT
Cofinancing: ESRR, Ministry of Culture Slovenia, Municipality of Piran, JSKD, M.C.Ruk
Media sponsor: Radio Študent
