Tomáš Werner
born in 1977 in Piešťany / Slovakia
is a Slovak artist exploring the intersection between photography, video
and performance
in his work, he questions the pre-defined rules and how we
perceive them based on our socio-historical development
Tomáš Werner // Landscape Spectacle // Video, Sound / 30 min // 2010
Tomáš Werner // Stranger than Ordinary // exhibition view
Stranger than
Ordinary
Sometimes
we have the feeling that things are either absolutely real or absolutely unimaginable.
That is to say, we cannot imagine that they are different only until they are
different and then we cannot imagine how it was before when we could not
imagine that they would be different.
Travel
is like a quest for something we feel we are missing. But what about the idea
as everything and everybody is traveling? Connectivity among places and people,
globalization of communication, flows of commodities: tourism is not very much
else than a game with mirrors, whose effects reproduce and sometimes transform
the landscape we are surrounded with. The comfort of modern tourism is the
comfort of finding ourselves more than loosing ourselves. We like to run away,
but we also like to land without crashing. An ordinary forest can be the
strangest thing. Luckily we understand that what is stranger than ordinary is
more ordinary than strange. Or may be vice versa.
Dreams
of foreign lands often collapse into vertigo of phantasmagoria, as we know from
Joseph Conrad but also from travel agencies advertisements. But to be cynical
about traveling is only to prove to the attitude of a global touring subject,
whose only thing to say about the complex socio-economic organization and
logistics of his trip is that Ryanair has narrow seats. How to travel in the
age of choice between mass tourism and customized adventure tours? And how to create
images about this age?
Tomáš
Werner
