SHADY LAGUNA 21/04/22 – 06/05/22 | MARIJA AVRAMOVIC & SAM TWIDALE
Cultural Center of Serbia, 123 rue Saint Martin, Paris, 75004
We invite you to the exhibition of the artistic duo of Marija Avramović and Sam Twiddale, Shady Laguna, which will be held from 21.4. to 7.5.2022. at the Cultural Center of Serbia in Paris. The opening of the exhibition starts at 7 pm on April 21.
The Shady Laguna exhibition includes watercolours by Marija Avramović and her joint digital works with Sam Twidale. Marija has been working more intensively on watercolours for the last few years, while she has been working on digital art since 2017 when she founded the duo xenoangel in collaboration with Sam.
Formally, both corpora of works are characterized by unique artistry by which Marija Avramović is recognizable – bright and fresh colours, lightness and subtlety, as well as a slight sense of incompleteness, the character of the open-ended sketch.
Looking at these watercolours, we are not sure what exactly is happening on them; the subject is displaced; we are distant witnesses rather than actors of an inevitable event in nature. The landscape is one of the basic preoccupations here – the means through which we experience the sublime. The mystical aspects of the landscape in Marija’s paintings have been present for a long time: in motifs, in perspective, as well as in the presence of people exclusively through traces. Shady Laguna tells us that fear of the sublime is just a guide to action. It is not a paralyzing fear of surprise but a mobilizing fear of the urge to survive. The future of the species will depend on its ability to adapt. In watercolours and, especially, in digital works, Marija and Sam suggest that the present, as well as the future, depends on the ability of people to learn to coexist, both with each other and with other species. For them, survival is a game – neither optimistic nor pessimistic. The game is driven by curiosity in finding new worlds, in which the condition of survival is the coexistence of species, where the examination and movement of the boundaries of the self take place, and even possible reconciliation with the end of civilization as we know it. The end of the Anthropocene does not act as a tragic fate of the species, but as a respite for the rest of the living world.
Marija Avramović (1989, Belgrade, Serbia) and Sam Twaindale (1988, Heraford, Great Britain) are stalkers of virtual worlds. Relatives of their choice, are different in origin and experience, each language they speak is a hybrid. Under the influence of social phenomena and anomalies, together they create cross-cultural worlds. They have been working together since 2017, often called Xenoangel. Marija studied painting in Belgrade (FLU), after which she completed another master’s degree at the School of Fine Arts in Paris (ENSBA).
Sam studied Popular Music Theory at the University of Liverpool and eventually learned programming. Together, they work on the border between real and artificial, and their real-time animation lives in symbiosis with work on paper and installations in physical space. Using the aesthetics of video games and artificial intelligence, together they create worlds that renew themselves independently and incessantly in front of the observer. Through working together, they find optimism in collective practices, transformation, symbiosis, techno-animism, object-oriented ontology, and the violation of narratives of human excellence.
Their work and research have been extensively informed through a variety of sources in pop culture and fiction, from Sartre’s ‘After the Intelligence’ (2017), techno-animism and Kurosawa’s film ‘Dreams’ (Sunshowers 2019), ‘Picnic by the Roadside’ ‘brothers Strugatski and essays by Jane Bennett (The Zone 2019), to the ideas of symbiosis and interdependence (Supreme, 2021).
* The project is financed from the budget of the Republic of Serbia – Ministry of Culture and Information.
