05 May 2011

Dalibor Martinis: Data Recovery. Video Works 1976 - 2011 at Motorenhalle, Dresden

Dalibor Martinis (*1947) is not only a well known Croatian artist, but also one of the pioneers of media art worldwide. As early as at the beginning of the 1970ies he started to work with video. But other than most of his colleagues at that time, he often reflected on the particular conditions of the medium. For his work 'Open reel' (1976) he wraps up his own head in tape that is just being recorded, revolves his body around like a second reel, thereby transcending the boundaries between documentation, technology and performance.

In a comparable vein, his work 'Dalibor Martinis talks to Dalibor Martinis' is no less than visionary. It is set in the year 2010 in a fictitious television studio. While the artist himself sits in a chair, in some kind of a talk show situation, he is being interviewed by his younger self on a monitor. The old black and white footage was shot back in the year of 1978, with the clear intention to stage a leap in time decades later. After DM of 2010 has positively responded to the question of Alter Ego, whether he is still alive, he explains why the biggest problem of the project did not really consist in the question of existence, but rather in the effort to preserve the film material itself and to keep it in a reproducible quality – in order to be able to conduct this dialogue at all. The film 'DM talks to DM' will assume a central position in our recent mini-retrospective of Dalibor Martinis in the Motorenhalle.

While dealing with the preconditions of the young medium in the beginning – such as with 'Video Immunity' (1978), where he performs a kind of ritual purification underneath the eye of a camera, he later concentrates on political issues. With 'Comrades and Citizens' (2006) he poses as Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of former Yugoslavia, repeating a propaganda speech of the latter. Initially projecting this footage in an open urban space, it was played it in reverse mode. That way the audience had no clear idea about the content. But as this situation was recorded too, it was possible to reproduce it backwards subsequently. All the people on the square suddenly move backwards, as if returning to a time long bygone, to times when this message used to be understandable.

Thus, 'Comrades and Citizens' addresses problems of transformation that took place after 1989 and somehow listens back to the aftereffects and shifts of these days.

With his recent video work 'Egyptian Odessa Stairs' (2011) Dalibor Martinis takes up this pingpong-game with past and present again, when he combines the famous scene from Sergej Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' with noises recorded at the 2011 turmoils in Egypt. Martinis is investigating the time warp, in which history reveals itself and remains true to his analytical strategies to the medium of video as well to political processes.


The exhibition 'Dalibor Martinis: Data Recovery. Videoarbeiten 1976-2011' will be opened on Wednesday, May 4th at 8 p.m. with a talk between the artist and curator Susanne Altmann.

Exhibition time: 05.05.- 21.05.2011

Venue: Motorenhalle. Projektzentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Adlergasse 14, 01067 Dresden, www.motorenhalle.de

Lecture: On Thursday, May 5th, 2011, Dalibor Martinis will talk about his work at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden (Güntzstraße 34)

This show is a collaboration between the series 'Videoabend', the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden and Kunstfonds, State Collection of Art Dresden