LIGHTING GUERRILLA 2015
Alessandro Lupi, Anna Berglind, Boris Beja, Elena Fajt, Tina Drčar

Lighting Guerrilla festival presents a selection of art works that rely on the medium of light. The ninth edition of the festival presents Slovenian and international artists that examine the theme of this year’s festival, which is ‘In the Dark’. Light makes objects visible and available to our senses, which makes them subject to reasoning and observation. But what happens when (natural) light goes? The artists explore what escapes the usual gaze, what shakes the spectator’s perception. We sought to touch upon the question of how light affects the expression and content of a work – the projects presented at the festival toy with the relationship between the visible and the invisible, but also between reality and fiction.

The formal aspect of the Twilight Zone exhibition largely focuses on the use of space and architecture and its functional elements. Site-specific interventions create circumstances for specific psycho-physical experiences that quickly trigger discomfort or anxiety. Some works offer more contemplative and poetic views that thematise different aspects of human life. The concept of darkness thus become a complex metaphor that encompasses hallucinations, dreams and illusions, opening a path into a world of memories and the past, and the unconscious and unattainable. In this respect, darkness is understood as an inseparable part of life, a dramatic metaphor for everything that escapes the clarity and transparency of light.

The video installation Lethe by Swedish artist Anna Berglind documents the tension between space, oblivion and (cultural) memory. Photographic images link the artist’s past and present; the illusion of a scene from the past on the surface of water creates a transition to a ‘memory landscape’. Elena Fajt’s installation Mediation is based on the visual and tactile relation between two elements: human hair is presented as symbolically representative of the primordial, of the primal, and creates dark presence in contrast with artificial lighting, which functions as the non-physical memory of the future. Boris Beja’s installation entitled Another Evening continues to study patterns and everyday habits, incorporating anxiety and fear. A manifestation of joy and celebration is confronted with the sounds of a battlefield to highlight two diametrically opposed experiences of life. The tension between the spectators’ expectations and their perception is accompanied with allegories of different stages of life. In one of the gallery windows, Slovenian artist Tina Drčar has created a shadow set, which has a lyricism that highlights the surrealist aspects of the everyday. The appropriated motif of a ronin, a samurai with no master, serves as a metaphor for the desire for liberation from the constraints of society.

Matjaž Brulc

Production: Strip Core/Forum Ljubljana in galerija Škuc

Thanks to: Miro Tišler, Andrej Učakar, Matej Tratnik

DONORS/SPONSORS: Kritine Majde, Pizzeria Foculus, Pizzeria Parma, Riwal najem opreme, d.o.o.

Lighting Guerrilla is part of the international Spectrum 14|15 project, which is co-financed by the European Union with the Creative Europe programme.