With a twist on the topic, Jurij Krpan poses the question of how a non-disabled body can under certain circumstances become un-whole. Using cybernetic prostheses as artistic supplements, the work of Stelarc, Marcel.li Antunez Roca, Arthur Elenaar, Davide Gassi find the 'handicap' originally inscribed in the organism, one that can expand its limits only through a specialized interface.
“Instead of thematizing this abuse set up by the 'normal' majority as a paradigm for disabled, unwhole bodies, we will try to indicate how this paradigm collapses if we equip, extend, improve... the 'normal' body with technological prostheses. We will describe several artistic projects where artists equip their body with additional functionalities – usually electronic or mechanical add-ons – which add new functionalities to existing ones. They enable the artists to expand the potentials of their expression and to attain a clear expressive advantage over the normal body. We could say that from the standpoint of productivity and efficiency, the category of disability has thus been expanded to include what was previously understood to be a normal body, thus revealing bodily disability as an ideologically and historically obsolete paradigm. The method of supplement, that old post-structuralist trick, proves to be well in place in this discourse.”
Jurij Krpan (SI)
Jurij Krpan lives and works in Ljubljana where at the initiative of the University Students’ Organisation he set up the Kapelica (Chapel) Gallery, which he still runs today. As curator and selector, he has taken part in numbers of festivals at home and abroad; his major international productions include the organisation and artistic direction of the Slovene Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and the Cosinus Conceptual Gallery located in the building of the European Commission in Brussels. In 2008 he took part in the Linz Ars Electronica, with a curatorial presentation of the artistic profile of Kapelica Gallery. Since 2004, as director of the art section in the Biennial Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean (Brussels) he has been concerned with raising the art level of this event. Within this organisation he edited a book called ORIGINAL – 100 Important BJCEM/BYAEM Artists about the artistic relevance of the biennial on its twentieth anniversary.
While in his architectural exhibition projects he has been particularly interested in the semantics of art exploits in the production of construction, in his work as gallerist he measures the correlation of the way works of art are thought through and their tactical impingement on contemporary society. At the focus of Kapelica Gallery production, since its very beginning, has been the area of art expressed through technology. Some of the most important proponents of this trend in the world have made guest appearances here, such as Stelarc, Marcel.li, SRL, Peljhan and Stenslie. The gallery has been a trendsetter in the area of science through art (Symbiotica, De Menezes, Orlan, Tabar and Tratnik) and works that derive from the treatment of human corporeality (Kulik, Delimar, Athey, Franko B, Eclipse). In his gallery he takes up the cause of the deconstruction of the white cube principle and favours a combination of artistic expressions that privilege deliberation and thoughtfulness. For this reason he does not understand his gallery as a recreational and contemplative space for the weary masses, but as an exhibition-cum-experimental platform for the active production of and intellectual investment into the values and reality of contemporary society.
