Translations 1

15 Okt. bis 5 Nov. 2010 P74 Center and Gallery, Prušnikova 74, Ljubljana

Eröffnung: FR, 15 Oktober 2010, 20.00 Uhr
Kuratorin: Barbara Sterle Vurnik

Ana Čigon, Studierende bei Interface Cultures zeigt ihre Arbeit "Translation 1".

Ana Čigon, the winner of the OHO Award (presented by the P74 Gallery to promising young visual artists), is an artist whose projects uncover characteristic deviations from everyday reality. She primarily addresses questions about social values and, within these, the issue of gender – the socially conditioned division of gender roles, gender-based behavior, gender-based differences, and so on. She is interested in the hidden causal layers that lead to the production of the myths and stereotypes connected with these issues. Thus, among other things, she points in particular to the mass media and their manipulative ability to create many (non)truths, especially false images of the perfect woman, which result in a detrimental effect on society. In her work, Čigon finds the possibility for commentary in various chosen expressive media. For some time now, she has been developing her notion of social commentary in painting and video. She tries to shed light on things in society that have been covered up or suppressed. By thematizing the customs and behavioral patterns of modern-day men and women she also touches on certain characteristic topics, such as the importance of personal happiness or the meaning of a work of art. To do so, she starts with concrete, for the most part unspectacular, but meaningful life situations, which she then visualizes, turns around, and interrogates. She plays with their established meanings and translates them into alternative solutions, as she has also done in her most recent project, Translations 1, which represents a continuation of her work to date.

Čigon’s latest project differs somewhat from her other works in its explicitly conceptual structure. On this occasion, however, Čigon has decided to address the viewer directly using only the manipulative power of a form of the mass media, namely, magazines. Thus she has conceived Translations 1 on the model of today’s women’s and men’s magazines. She selected a few of the most notorious, and most influential, publications found in Slovenia, which through their inane advice impose unrealistic norms and unattainable ideals of beauty, misleading and dulling the minds of the “believing” masses. To achieve a new balance of comparisons, she conceived and "published" new variations of one women's and one men's magazine both consisting of 40 pages of text, pictures and also few advertising pages. Her purpose was to make visible a great amount of stereotypes hidden in text an pictures that are found in this kind of magazines.

The method she used to show this is "translation". She took the articles that she found in women's magazines and put them into the new men's magazine and vice versa. She also replaced all the female names with male names and corrected the text where it was necessary. Similarly she proceeded whit pictures - where there was a picture of a man in the magazine, she replaced it with a woman etc.

Both of the new developed magazines work in two phases: the initially predictable look of the official magazines (or rather Čigon’s copies) retroactively triggers the viewer’s recognition of the “truth” and the trick.

text by Barbara Sterle Vurnik