Author: Róbert Repka
You can find the photoreport here.
Modern humans have always strived to obtain and maintain a significant degree of control and management over the natural world. By possessing nature, modern culture has convinced itself to have the ultimate independence, autonomy and sovereignty over its surroundings.
At first, captivity was motivated by a figure of Eden, preserving the pristine and untouched. However, the anthropocene, climate and ecological crisis, disease and pandemics gave rise to a new figure, and that of an Ark, thus saving everything that is arbitrarily listed as worth saving.
Juraj's work addresses these processes within the space of a ZOO, a modern heterotopia which blurs the line between wilderness and captivity, nature and culture, life and death. He challenges any notion of the pristine and unravels hidden biopolitical dynamics of knowledge, power and control.
Juraj works with his former piece of a massive architectural structure which originated in a ZOO, now it contains a leaking and expansive foam.
By a metaphor of a "foam in the cage", Martin points to a wider socio-political context and demonstrates the deficiency of any power regime to subdue, imprison, or subjugate. He shows how forms are unruly and evasive; they escape and expand.
Former gardens, now a brownfield in Vienna, has served as a collection spot for Martin to gather fragments of old steel and bricks. He then shapes these materials into plinths for projectors. They project animated photographs of fence ornaments in a dance-like movement onto the walls of the space.
Martin Chramosta (1982, Zurich) is a cross-media artist who works primarily in the fields of sculpture, drawing, video, and performance. He studied at the Institut Kunst at HGK Basel in Switzerland. His studies in fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts led him to Vienna, where he also taught at the Department of Sculpture and Space at the University of Applied Arts.Chramosta’s work, inspired by architectural forms ranging from antiquity through Art Nouveau to Postmodernism, engages with fragments of history that he transforms in unexpected ways. The resulting objects take the form of fictional doors, gates, façades, or fragments of railings, which retain a playful connection to reality through details such as a door handle or other references to everyday life. As idiosyncratic gateways to the past, these eclectic portals turn historical tropes upside down.
Juraj Rattaj completed his doctoral studies in the Sculpture Studio in 3D Virtual Space and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (VŠVU), under the supervision of Professor Patrik Kovačovský. In 2021, together with a collective of educators and students from VŠVU, he received the CE ZA AR award for architecture. From 2010 to 2023, he ran the artist-run gallery HotDock, which focused on short-term presentations of emerging young artists, where he organised more than one hundred and fifty exhibitions.
In his work, he reflects on the possibility of socialising technology through art. He currently focuses on the issue of colonised nature and seeks to re-evaluate how we perceive this problem.