VITREOUS SKY

multi-channel sound installation
5 – 29 May 2022
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
+ MSUM hosts the work Vitreous Sky, which belongs to the program of the Steklenik Gallery

The multi-channel sound installation Vitreous Sky by the intermedia artist Marko Batista is a continuation of the artist’s unique artistic reflection and exploration of modern post-fact society in relation to technological progress, or simply the ties within the society-nature-technology, in the context of ecocritical discourse, environmental policies and pressing humanist concepts (nature, the Anthropocene, the capitalist colonial matrix, etc.). It is somewhat a continuance of the positions instituted by the artist in the  Fluid Particles of Volcanic Ash (Gallery 001, 2017). Through this apocalyptic sound-and-space installation, the viewer – despite the absence of the Anthropocene – indirectly faces its presence through a devastated landscape with nothing but traces of a few surviving (post)humanoids. exhibition

The exhibition revolves around two precisely crafted interactive, hybrid, visual-sound objects – prototypes of a dystopian habitat of our futures, created by the artist to address the project on two intertwined levels, i.e., the symbolic and the practical level of artistic representation. The Vitreous Sky installation is a visual-and-sound composition. In the visual part composed of a two-part mimetic installation with a 3D printer-produced postnatural environment, the artist establishes a dialogue between urban and rural habitats. The sonic structure of the installation rests on the electrolysis of toxic compounds, which produce a sound within an extended electronic system in the process of self-oscillation and extraction. Its placement in the center gives matter agency, endowing the work with openness in becoming and space for surprise. With the selected elements, or better yet, matters and materialities, Marko Batista not only explores but always reflects, which allows him to move away from moralism and enter into open, always fluid, and changing spaces, over which even the artist himself does not have complete control.