Fokus Grupa

Bio

Fokus grupa has been active since 2012. In its work, it tries to establish a critical framework for reading the artistic, economic and political surroundings in which it operates. It lends and learns from design, architecture, curatorship and writing, while often broadening its working team with collaborators from other fields. In 2015 the collective participated in the post-master’s programme of the Bauhaus Dessau, and in 2016 with the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Scholarship, they developed a project seminar at the Innsbruck Institute for Architectural Theory which, realized as Exhistenzoptimum project was exhibited at Kunstpavilion Innsbruck in 2016. and in its extended version at the exhibition Some Shapes of Things to Come at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg in 2018. In 2016 they also exhibited the project Stories about Frames at MSU, Zagreb and at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona and MSUB, Belgrade. The project Invisible Matter was exhibited in 2017 at Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, and in 2018 at Onomatopee, Eindhoven.

The And of Art IN at FOR new

Installation/exhibition design, digital print on self-adhesive vinyl, 2017
Variable dimensions
 

The And of Art IN at FOR new*'s take on e-flux does not reproduce Triple Canopy's puritan critique of International Art English or the retaliation which followed on e-flux. It proposes a correlation of the Collection Collective's model of an art collection run by cultural producers with the e-flux model of an artist-run database of art writing. Whilst Collection Collective seeks to intervene into the circulation and consumption of material art production, e-flux is a major player in the information and discourse circulation of the art-world.

In an attempt to focus on language as material rather than as representation The And of Art IN at FOR new was composed with software tools designed for text manipulation and analysis. The long line of text follows the parameters of the physical space of tranzit(dot)sk in an attempt to articulate language both as material and as measuring device, thus linking the physical space of tranzit(dot)sk with the imagined space of e-flux.

* 8 most frequently used words in e-flux announcement titles

The line was composed in the following way:

  38 keywords were extracted from the curatorial text.

  Those 38 keywords were used to query the entire corpus of the e-flux Journal.

  Each keyword appeared in numerous lines of text.

  Lines were sorted alphabetically, according to a word that precedes the keyword in a sentence.

  A random line of text for each letter of the alphabet was selected.

  Text adjacent to the keyword (from punctuation mark to punctuation mark) was extracted from each line.

  Selected strings of text were reordered according to the journal number in which they appear.

  Letter capitalisation was corrected according to punctuation rules and line-breaks were removed.

Provenance: Collection Collective: Template for a Future Model of Representation, tranzit.sk, Bratislava 2017

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