• Film / Painting
    /

    • MEHANISTA: 8 Portraits of Cyborgs

    Film, Painting

    2022

    Digital painting, installation, video 9 min

    ‘MEHANISTA: 8 Portraits of Cyborgs’ is an installation that consists of eight monumental digital paintings and video. It is a cybermanifesto presenting the idea of Self as a hybrid and fluid concept determined by our ever-changing relationship with the environment, the animals, and the machines. We are not isolated, singular selves, but complex, syncretic beings. At the heart of the concept lies the viewpoint that technology is a tool of liberation, not of war. The paintings present eight portraits of cyborgs, inspired by historical and contemporary semi-documentary and semi-fictional images, accompanied by textual manifestos from antiquity to the present day. These images show that ideas of the hybrids between people and technology are not new, even though the active discussion about them in their contemporary form dates back only a century. My perspective on this relationship requests technology to be a mean of liberation while critiquing its use to feed the primal human desire to dominate, rule, and destroy itself along with everything else.

    The installation is situated in hall #19 of the National Gallery Kvadrat 500, and co-exists with ancient archeological remains of a Roman chamber tomb emphasizing the relationship between past and present, technology and death.

    Thunder: The Perfect Mind (excerpts on the image on the right)

    I am the mother and the daughter.

    I am the members of my mother.

    I am the barren one and many are her sons.

    I am she whose wedding is great,

    and I have not taken a husband.

    I am the midwife and she who does not bear.

    I am the solace of my labor pains.

    I am the bride and the bridegroom,

    and it is my husband who begot me.

    I am the mother of my father

    and the sister of my husband

    and he is my offspring.

    Unknown author – The Thunder, Perfect Mind, 350 

    Guessing Game

    Screen performance, 9:35 min.

    I’m Jinn, I read thoughts like magic. Think of an animal…Is it bigger than a washing machine?

    “Guessing Game” is a performance recorded directly from the computer screen where the action takes place. Boryana Rossa plays with digital images telling a story about their relationships. The creation of images in the digital space allows us to produce relatively easy fantastical creatures that move and interact. Their hybrid nature does not raise amusement, but rather interacts easily with our subconsciousness where a microwave could have muscles, dogs wear glasses and human heads roll and shoot with their eyes. This techno-game is a new form of the age-old practice of connecting with the unknown through chimerical imagery.

    The artist works with Internet memes (chimeras such as Trollge (hybrid with Mr. Trololo), Doge, Cheems, KB & QT), often represented within Internet subcultures as active exponents of ideas. Shooting, smashing, copying, and reloading right on the screen is activating these ideas, but is also a practice of many teenagers across the globe. Issues of Internet violence have been discussed many times and led to different conclusions. For Rossa, this violence is both a sublimation of hidden desires and a consciously accepted cultural code. In this video, she ends “the fight” with a drawing of a white dove that carries an olive branch.

    Contact
    bori999@gmail.com
    Contact:
    Boryana Rossa
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