Curators: Neža Grum and Luka Polutnik
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana, 2016
Length: 52’
Premiere: Short Film Night, December 21, 2016, Slovenian Cinematheque, Ljubljana

In the present times an individual is faced with an abundance of information, shaping their everyday life and redirecting their attention. The programme explores attention deficiency on two levels. The selection of six video works tries to capture the viewer’s attention and at the same time tests it and looks for the reasons for its absence. It does this with humor, sexuality, meditation and spirituality, provocativeness, repetitivity and materiality. Subjects, which are each in their own way inherently connected to the search of meaning and as such they each present their own possibility of escape, might in the right balance offer a solution. For what exactly? Well, that is a whole other question.

Oliver Marčeta, Jesus von New Orleans, 2’50’’
O.M., 1994

White background with black wires forming a figure on it, tangling themselves and intertwining until the created character pins itself onto a cross like Jesus Christ, compose an expressive animation video work. The depth is strengthen by a shadow formed by the interspace between the wire and the background. The author reaches expressivity by manipulating the material in its rawness and economy.
 

Jasna Hribernik, House of Contrasts, 20′ 17″
TV Slovenija, 1998
» video

Video documents a day in a house, where both the main Ljubljana food market and Christian seminary are based. Lively, ordinary conversations with the vendors blend with scenes from peaceful clerical life, which goes on undisturbed in the upper storeys of the same building. While the first, engaged with the earth and the material side of being, the second deal with spiritual and soulful aspect of life. Through the narrator the author questions about existence of life beyond matter.
 

Ana Sluga, Still Life II, 2′ 30″
A.S., 2011
» video

A static shot of a meadow with trees in autumn morning. The mist slowly rises and the light is barely changing. The soundtrack is an excerpt of an interview with Milton Friedman, the famous economist and defender of the free market and liberal capitalism.
 

Mark Požlep, Soft Machine, 9′ 53″
M.P., 2010
» video

The video shows static shots of a couple having sex from three different angles. Voyeuristic position of the camera (the author) and viewer tries to cause a uneasiness in watching another person. An intruder constantly appears inside the shot in a form of stylized animated dwarf, who is watching the act from a direct closeness. The viewer is thus faced with their own observing, the voyeurism of the other and a triple moral dilemma. The author tests the viewer’s response on three levels: with causing uneasiness while watching an intimate act between two strangers ignoring their surroundings; questioning uneasiness while watching someone else stalking; and an uneasiness caused by their own voyeurism.
 

Nataša Prosenc Stearns, Concerete Man, 15′ 29″
TV Slovenija, 1995

A woman’s shoe gets stuck in concrete in the middle of the city. Her usual rhythm of life is disturbed. She is impatient to solve the problem. But a string of unexpected events interferes with her plans. Her world of fast living, obligations and errands turns into a pilgrimage to find the lost shoe… until she finally gives into the flow of events. At the end of the film she finds the shoe, which has by now lost its role as the primary motive for her search.
 

Ana Čigon, OHOHO, 1′ 30″
A.Č., 2015
» video

The artist humorously comments on the problem of unpaid artistic work with a short video. The work was projected for the first time at an exhibition at the ten year anniversary of the OHO group award, Don’t eat yellow snow! at the P74 Gallery in 2015. This is where the title derives from, as a teasing derivative of the word OHO.