Peter Koštrun: I Broke My Time
The solo exhibition opens: Wednesday, 20 December at 7 pm in the Photon Gallery
20. 12. 2023 – 26. 1. 2024
The artist Peter Koštrun links the inspiration for the newly created photographs to a specific moment when he realised while working on his computer that he had “broken his time” that day. According to the artist, the perception of time has been fragmented by the intertwining of life with technology, the rhythm of life has become inexorably faster and our relationship with nature has become all the more abstract. Together with the climate crisis and current conflicts, the artist experiences the current state of the world as unbearable. This is indirectly illustrated by the works in the exhibition, which he places in a wider context and links to the processes in nature. The latter is the artist’s most important source of inspiration for his work and the cornerstone of his philosophy of life.
The two extremes depicted are the artist’s response to the current social situation in the world, which is on the verge of breaking point, as it can no longer bear the damage caused by the modern way of life. In the smaller gallery space on the right, we see stark, almost documentary photographs of dead insects caught on sticky boards that deliberately look like projection screens in the artist’s depictions. Koštrun refers to the specific spectrum of yellow used to attract insects as a metaphor for screens that lure us in, “in the belief that we will see the truth on them, but in the end a miserable death, so to speak, awaits us, like the insects”. In the age of “techno-feudalism”, it is time that is breaking for the author, because there is a disconnect between seeing and experiencing in our displacement into the virtual world. The small space of the gallery is deliberately saturated, “brutal” and its strictly realistic character makes it appear somewhat scientific in its presentation of the concept. The larger left-hand gallery space is the counterpart to the smaller one. It offers an “infinite softness” in contrast to the “infinite sharpness” of the previous room, as the artist calls it. In this space, Koštrun recreates emptiness in monochrome hues with images of falling “black” snow. Together with the enlargement of an indexical mushroom print, acting as an eye, this offers a contrast to science and, for the artist, represents its antithesis – art. The antagonism between the two spaces blurs at times and complements each other in the transition between the two artistic responses, in the question “How do we move forward?”
The exhibition as a whole is, in the artist’s words, “a metaphor for the world that surrounds us and for the architecture of the processes that we co-create. It is a critique of all of us who struggle and a tribute to those who have given up. It is a prerequisite for new beginnings, even if not everything is over yet. The works in the exhibition are a response to the realisation that ‘breaking time’ means being aware not only of one’s own vulnerability, but of everyone’s vulnerability, while accepting the disappointment that no matter how hard we try, we are just a trace of the crowd.” (Peter Koštrun).
Curator of the Exhibition: Špela Pipan