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Ljubljana in 4 acts - interview by Paola Palleari

NERO Magazine

The suggestiveness reaches its peak in the evening, when the internal wooden staircase creaks under my feet as I go up to my apartment, and a reassuring calm pervades the corridors. Behind each door hides a creative habitat on its own, since many spaces—that originally were hotel rooms—are still used as artist studios. The fascination is such that I hear a hypnotic voice chanting what sounds like a mantra from the door next to my apartment. I’m not dreaming: it’s my fellow resident, Agnes Mormirski, practicing for the live performance part of her solo show siXren (Verbum Medicinae), scheduled at MGLC Švicarija in a few weeks.

 

Way to optimization - Interview by Miha Colner

New Edge Magazine, Ljubljana, 2020

In her creative practice Rotterdam-based artist Agnes Momirski aims to investigate some of the most fundamental questions of human existence; our mental and physical abilities as well as the relationship with other entities that surround us. Her interdisciplinary works, spanning from performance, video installation, music and writing, are deeply rooted in voice and language, explore arcane, healing and ritual methods through a post-humanist lens. The artist uses her own appearance and voice to question human condition in the period when technology is being ever more merged with the human body. Furthermore, she opposes the artificial divide between nature and culture, which has been appropriated in the period of scientific and technological development of modern era, and resorts to connect the ideas from pre-modern and hyper-modern contexts. Her works refer to practices such as ancient Greek rhetoric, word magic, ritual poetry, as well as contemporary cognitive science. The artist tends to impact the audience directly by conducting group meditations, chanting rituals and spellbound in order to enable immersive experience. In the beginning of the year (2020), Momirski was invited to attend the artist-in-residence programme at MGLC Švicarija in Ljubljana, and was commissioned to produce a new piece in order to further explore her ongoing practice. In less than two months the siXren (verbum medicinae) project was developed and showcased at MGLC Švicarija (until 2 August 2020). The interview took place during her dwelling at the residency at Švicarija, amidst the development her new piece which has been presented as a one-off performance and as a spatial video installation.

Sirena

Interview Radio Student

One-hour program, with live sound from siXren (verbum medicinae) and interview

ANXIOUS CITY FESTIVAL by Healing places

Rotterdam, 2.9.2018

Live stream broadcast by RAAR (Rotterdam Art And Radio)

Artist talk on my interest in healing practices, techno-utopia, the potential of new technologies for healing. And my interest in voice and narration, and it's effect on human consciousness.

Listen to a recording from the performance Digital dawn, Luminous voices, and a performative reading of a text from Detox me, Detox U performance.

 

KONTRA PODCAST by Kontra festival

Rotterdam, 1.11.2018

Artist talk on my interest in healing practices, techno-utopia, the potential of new technologies for healing. And my interest in voice and narration, and it's effect on human consciousness.

Listen to a recording from the performance Digital dawn, Luminous voices, and a performative reading of a text from Detox me, Detox U performance.

 

VALA: two channel installation at KIBLA, Maribor

Shelters of Babylon, Kiblix festival 2017

November 2017

 

Vala: Nature, Love and Technology – The Revolution of the Mind
Interview with Agnes Momirski by Dunja Kukovec

Interview for New Edge Magazine

2017

 

Your artworks seem to embody the present from a futuristic perspective. Due to your in-depth interest in the subject and subjectivity, your research of technology relates to communication, information and social interfaces. In the quantum world of mind preceding matter and by entering the virtually real space time matrix your art work seems capable of socio-political affirmation and critique, simultaneously. How do you see all that in the relation to the irreversibility and change-potential of technology?

It became rather impossible to detach oneself from technology – therefore the simultaneously affirmative and critical position is inevitable. Tech opens up so many cultural, ethical, social and other questions. I am interested how our perceptual experience changes through the fractured nature of one's subjectivity (online), and the modalities and multiplicities of formats within which we communicate. Especially the different layers and variables of interactions through which new forms of subjectivities are constructed. Historically, with every new technology introduced to society the human consciousness or psychology shifted or changed. These mental shifts have been affecting our existential ecosystem and social organism, as well as our creative production, and I find the emerging states of consciousness quite fascinating.

They compared your work with Maya Deren’s movies, I find elements of Matthew Barney’s and Mariko Mori’s art. However, in your art work all the technological hardware is reduced to phenomena of the screens. Even though your woman image resembles a gender less character, s/he is still a woman. What kind of the mind-set represents the context of your work?
 

The screen is a reflective surface, serving purposes of dissemination, connectivity, and transcendence. In my work, the use of video renders the duration of transformation processes, and is essentially a medium that allows exploration of the mental, inner, spiritual life. I employ the combination of video and screen-based technologies and cinematic techniques, to depict these ephemeral phenomena of disembodied and virtual existence. Capturing the elusive modalities of being, defragmented and disembodied subjectivities and above all, the process of unfolding the mental self along a certain time axis. Usually, the unfolding of self in my works is represented through the language and is text based – be it in a dialogue, lyrics, or poetry.

 

For a long while, I've been interested in the voice as an indicator of presence and absence and it's shapeshifting through tech. In VALA, the video installation, which refers to demon in Vedic scriptures, female shaman in nordic mythology, and finally to Vala in William Blake's mythological system. Inspired by the “flood” of digital/virtual assistants and instructional contents/interfaces, I am addressing the notion of a (historic) female role as a consultant, a guide and an entertainer. The project stages the intertwining of the digital, entertaining and consoling female voice, out of which emerges a new hybrid voice that travels through various embodiments - a poetic voice tagging glitches, clicks and shifts of consciousness during the wandering and scrolling online.

 

In the epic poem Vala, William Blake creates a new law, a new antonym. Instead of the love hate phrase, now we can firmly live within the love nature paradigm, as love and nature present two flips of the same coin. To see how all this falls into the world of of techno abundance, VALA video installation opened at Kino Šiška on 12th of June, 2017.
 

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