[-empyre-] Introducing Isak Berbic and Larissa Sansour

[Isak Berbic]

Dear Renate and Tim,
Thank you for putting together this thoughtful ever so relevant discussion with an exciting group of guests this month.
I am looking forward to engage in dialogue with Larissa Sansour and everyone.



Below are my thoughts on the directions I am taking with my art practice. 
Thank you for reading.

Isak Berbic
Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

This link will lead you to a recent interview about a performance work I did at an economic forum here in Dubai (December, 2010).
http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/4789




My photography, text, performance and videos analyze the mediating of events, their aesthetic representations within the rhetorical narrative of history and their transcendence into myth. I start with the specific; a gesture, a happening, a message; and work on reframing it and drawing together wider relationships to focus and more importantly expand the possibilities of meanings. Therefore the use and juxtaposition of several semantic systems and levels of reference with a purposeful coexistence of contradictory concepts and aesthetic strategies are in effort of confirming that homogeneous information structures no longer exist. I deliberately conflate codes from news media, politics, pop culture, art histories, art business and popular contemporary mediums to produce an eclecticism appropriate to the crisis of the idea that there is a coherent history. 

I am particularly interested in the process of the production of a hegemonic cannon of history in relation to the particularity of the subjective and the peripheral; reflecting on the representations of official narratives and mapping fragments of the production of information, social, cultural and political values. The artworks entail, but not limited to: facts, ideology within personal and cultural history, nationalism, tragedy, European minority, exile and immigrant life in the United States of America, supposed westernization of the east and exoticization and self-exoticization of the east and the Balkans. I utilize strategies such as bureaucratic language, humor, repetition, faux-mythology and spectacle. My argument is that mythology and mystified interpretation universalizes the act of interpreting, lifting it above history and political context, therefore obscuring particularity. I am interested in revealing the perversion of collective memory,
 analyzing folklore and criticizing concepts of identity. In this effort, fictional and documentary material is combined to complicate our understanding of the cultural, the subjective, the political and the universal. A work titled "My uncle gave me his tooth to take from Bosnia to America to photograph; and now I have sent it back, 2005" is a piece in which I took his tooth and flew with it to the US. The tooth was packaged and shipped after its exhibition in Chicago. My uncle did not want his 'bones to stay in a foreign land'.



"A project titled "Using Ruins (2006 – present) (Sarajevo, Mostar, Beirut, Haifa) is a series of images of war destroyed civilian homes with the photographs' surface painted on with decorative motifs in hot-rod-car spray-paint. The photographs invoke a delusional positivism. This delusion is despite all the objective evidence to the contrary. There is conflict between the documentary informational content in the photograph, and the aesthetic, decorative application. The layer of decorative artifice infuses the images with a surrogate romanticism pointing to the formal vacancy of the photograph. The resulting abjective images confront tropes such as press photography, ethnographical cinema and tourist arts and crafts. The use of indexical and documentary media as a carefully constructed critique of its very limits suggests an intervention in the politics and semiotics of representation. By working with these complications, one may begin to contest the
 prevailing dichotomy between truth and fiction, by advocating that it is not a simple choice between truth or fiction anymore; rather it is a choice of formulating certain strategies of lies to reach relative truths."
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