In today's times of digital transition and dematerialization, Neža Knez's practice, which designates film and its analog characteristics as a physical object, somewhat defies the trend of the times. The artist openly acknowledges that everything related to imagery is manipulable. Through contact copying on 16mm film, collage, circulation, and screening, she returns to analog images and their representational systems, primarily using actual physical objects: prints, negatives/positives, and opto-mechanical devices. These approaches allow for dynamism, and different dissemination, deliberately omitting or altering the logic of the presentation and perception of images. Similar to imagery, she also challenges sound by creating auditory sensations through the amplification of projectors in their operation. These amplified bodies gain a DIY (do-it-yourself) playful authority and a multi-perspective haptic quality. They function autonomously in their environment, lively, somewhat humorous, and sincerely industrious.
When Structure is Replaced by Fragmented Moments
2023
analogue 16mm film loops, sound installation (contact microphones, 16mm film strips
In cooperation:
ArtKIT (KIBLA)
Production and exhibition:
Ministry of Culture Slovenia
Photo documentation:
Neža Knez
*Video will be available soon.
There is something openly fragile and poetic for the artist when facing the materiality of analog film. The artist's focus is not directed toward storytelling but rather motivated and interested in creating an experiential environment where fragmented moments can reappear and reassemble. Neža herself admits to being enchanted by the process, as she spends hours and hours processing, reprocessing, selecting, manually editing, copying, developing, reusing, overlapping, and reshaping the film rolls of her previous works or thoroughly collected found analog film footage. Darkness turns into light, light is sometimes obscured, resemblances emerge, shaken and fleeting in their fragile materiality and unpredictability of lifespan. The process is revealed when it is presented. And this self-revelation is all we have.
But there are also brief glimpses of lived reality that resemble film as a reproductive tool, calling upon its original mimetic capabilities. We possess the ability to understand similarities, as W. Benjamin says in his text »Doctrine of the Similar.« These similarities are archived in language, as well as in images, and they clearly revealing the duality of the moment. Similarities occur in phantomatic positives or negatives, rhythmically appearing and disappearing in the exhibition space. Bringing us back to the point of our present, material historicity. Believe me, I believe.
*Ivana Meštrov
