Happy Spiraling
EXHIBITION
11/06 – 06/09
Museum of Contemporary Art
Exhibition opening: 11/06 @ 8 pm
Curators: Barbara Gregov, Lovro Japundžić, Lea Vene
International jury of the exhibition: Thomas Conchou, Morana Matković, Natálie Kubíková, Daria Tuminas and Organ Vida
On screen, everything has become equally urgent and equally disposable. Nothing shocks. Nothing settles. Nothing lingers long enough to feel real. We are overstimulated, but underwhelmed.
This year’s edition of Organ Vida, titled Happy Spiraling, seeks to find meaning in an everyday life saturated with images. We are interested in how contemporary visual culture reflects reality, but also how it actively produces it: how it shapes the ways we see and understand the world and how we make art. The featured works engage with an overstimulated digital world in different ways - whether by exposing how it manipulates and exhausts us, by destabilizing it through subversion, by gaming it, mocking it, or escaping from it altogether.
Jame St Findlay, Rafael Roncato, and Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė address surveillance and control in online space in their works.
At the center of Jame St Findlay’s installation is an experimental film that explores contemporary manifestations of paranoia, delusion, and social breakdown. Ironically titled Harmony, the film follows several individuals for whom the contemporary world no longer makes sense. Recording their impulsive and absurd outbursts, the work probes - both humorously and poignantly - what happens when the logic of everyday life starts to break down.
In the photographic installation Tropical Trauma Misery Tour, Rafael Roncato offers a critical reflection on the mechanisms of networked propaganda within Brazil’s political landscape. The work starts from the attempted assassination of former president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, and the way that event was instrumentalized in the media to enable his political rise. Using the same docufictional strategies as the political spectacle it critiques, the work cleverly exposes it as cheap ideological manipulation.
Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė’s Screen Works addresses the anxiety of online interactions under constant surveillance. To tackle this virtual unease, the artist materializes it by translating digital images onto glass through silkscreen printing. The print is not visible on the object itself, but on the wall - a shadow cast when light passes through the glass’s dark surface. In this way, it simulates a screen: a surface saturated with the ceaseless flow of insignificant images, and also a space of fantasy which hides endless unrealized desires.
Aurélie Bayad, Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, and Hiiona Choi explore how fiction, the internet, and pop culture shape contemporary female identities and representations.
In the series of photographic sculptures Epoxy, Dreams, Found Memory, Aurélie Bayad portrays queer female experience in online space, where vulnerability, sadness, and idleness are foregrounded as key strategies of resistance to capitalism’s imperatives of productivity and visibility. Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski’s installation Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen functions as a monument to an obsession with the character of Sookie Stackhouse, the heroine of the TV series True Blood. Drawing on her own fascination, the artist explores fangirl culture as a space of escapism, projection, and collective emotion.
Hiiona Choi’s monumental sculptures and photographs function as fictional forensic traces. Balancing between document and fiction, Supermodel offers the audience intimate fragments from the women the works are named after, inviting viewers to explore and reconstruct stories of their lives and fates.
Irma Name, Madeleine Andersson, Maja Bojanić, and Brin Žvan parody contemporary production of knowledge and truth, while Hertta Kiiski rejects classical epistemological frameworks, turning instead to affective and intuitive ways of understanding reality.
The artist duo Irma Name uses the sitcom format to critically examine the growing role of artificial intelligence in the production of knowledge. In the film Simulation Comedy, actors perform scenes written with the help of AI, trying to make sense of them - yet meaning slips away through constant repetition. Viewers find themselves somewhere between entertainment and disorientation, left to their own interpretations and speculations.
Madeleine Andersson, for her part, focuses on the epistemic crisis in contemporary science. In a comic blend of scientific and popular discourse, the film installation Degenerative Knowledge Production reveals how knowledge is produced and who gets to control it.
Maja Bojanić and Brin Žvan also focus on knowledge production within an institutional context. Their installation offers an insight into the work of the fictional Institute for Mold Preservation. At the center of the piece is a video game in which the audience exploring the Institute’s archives and hidden areas, gradually uncovers its unsolvable structural problems and unbearable working conditions.
Hertta Kiiski, on the other hand, develops an affective and intuitive approach to knowledge, seeking to move away from rational models of its production. The combination of photographic and sculptural elements creates a hallucinatory ambience in which experience, sensation, and association become fundamental tools for understanding the work and the world.
This year’s edition of Organ Vida does not offer clear solutions or stability. Instead, it lingers in the spiral long enough to find tenderness, humor, and the possibility of resistance within it.