Through installation, drawing and constructed environments, the project develops from an interest in spatial imaginaries and archetypes circulating through contemporary image systems – spaces that operate simultaneously as ritualistic, synthetic and affective environments. The works explore collectively produced conceptions of space shaped through media circulation, online atmospheres and aesthetic repetition. The spatial constructions function as speculative tests: attempts to examine what might emerge from distributed aesthetic fragments, symbolic codes and circulating visual languages.
Within these environments, wood shacks appear as hyper-contemporary constructions – spatial projections of imaginaries assembled from occult symbols, sigils, survivalist aesthetics and synthetic wilderness imagery recurrent across online image circulation, gaming environments, architectural renders and digitally mediated visual culture. Space is approached almost as an object or model, invoking technical referents such as vector space, a condition in which interior and exterior no longer operate primarily as phenomenological experiences, but increasingly as rendered and simulated states. Space no longer appears as something stable or directly experienced, but as something encountered through models, simulations and imaginaries circulating through media systems. The project focuses on internet-produced spatial archetypes and synthetic conceptions of wilderness and interiority generated through image circulation, repetition and simulation.
Maks Bricelj is a visual artist working with sculpture-installation and drawing. He holds a BA in Painting and an MA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. His practice is based on a hands-on process of constructing, transforming and arranging forms in space. Through building, casting, layering and assembling, he develops sculptural structures and spatial situations that hover between constructed environments, fragments and imagined artefacts. Drawing runs alongside this process as a way of developing forms, atmospheres and imagined spaces. His works often evoke liminal environments, moving between polished, artificial surfaces and signs of wear, instability and slow decay.
Ema Maznik Antić is a visual artist and researcher based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Working across installation, writing and artistic research, she explores the spatial imaginaries, narratives and material environments through which particular worlds are constructed, inhabited and brought into being. Her work is informed as much by wandering, lurking and following spatial curiosities as by more conventional forms of research.
Many thanks to: Fabrikaid d. o. o., Živa Božičnik Rebec, Nicholas Gardner, Robert Petek, Theater Glej
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023 (as part of the U30+ initiative to support young artists)