Jasna Jakšić. Light at The End of The Screen, text for the exhibition Uncomparables. Forming a Suspicious State
Immaterial labor – removed from the production system that creates new, firm, lasting values that would make the world a better place – occupies a high position in desirable economic models. Its manifest presence creates a new class of nomadic cognizance in the culture industry, a class of intellectual laborers left to the laws of interest, demand and supply. Like in the previous century’s different economic context, surplus secures competitiveness and quality and only the best wins. Abandoning materiality and fixed object in both economy and art did provided new opportunities for expression and action in multiple ways. Hasn’t the resistance against fetishization of art object succeeded in replacing the concept of artwork with a much more fluid concept of work at the exact time when immaterial labor became predominant in culture industries, slowly shutting down every promised path to its freedom? The dystopian space of erased borders in which the only remaining structure is the structure of surveillance, or corporate control is -in the work of Tina Gverovic and Sinisa Ilic- inhabited by motionless characters who appear to be focused on the light of the computer screen, a window into the world of promised freedom or a medium for the production of non-places which are developed through the interconnection of footage from security camera systems all over the world. In such a dystopian environment, to which everyone is invited, or more precisely, to which we are obliged to participate, positions of the observer and the observed are linked into relations that create the world. From co/action and co/relation the threat of a saturated space grows. In spaces that are seemingly empty, states of agoraphobia and claustrophobia leave their victims without any possibility to escape. Immanent disaster emerges from condensed cracks in the Real. These cracks then penetrate a world deprived of physical effort in which no one can feel the sweat on their brow. The cracks bulge out from damaged metal bar structures and organic simulations of nature amongst invasions of a repetitive string of manual and ‘dirty’ weapons or tools. Fragile narrative and descriptive elements unsuccessfully attempt to form a whole, but each attempt makes them even more fragile. But, as a glimmer of useless hope, we’re left with the light of the computer screen, at least as long as the electricity flow is provided.