4. 4. 2023, 19.00 / DobraVaga (until 11. 5. 2023)
ARTIST PER MONTH | Ulla Žibert: Dialogue: quiet consumption
exhibition

After several years of research, constant repetition and returning to turning words around, playing with shadows and questioning the concept of human comfort, Ulla Žibert finally recreates an intimate atmosphere with an installation that addresses the issue of instant pleasure placed alongside compulsive consumerism and individualism.

The exhibition, the origin of which is a phrase that emerged years ago from the artist’s inner impulse, took shape through many manifestations and resolutions into a subtle spatial arrangement that foregrounds the confrontation with and response to an omnipresent period of change. In the gallery space, the artist establishes a dialogue between illuminated papers with carved texts and their cast shadows, which form newly created ambivalent meanings and, as a result, create wordplay, a turnabout in the content, and tension. The original story about sex, plastic and endangered animal species has, through many manifestations of the search for self-resolution and repetitive experimentation, evolved into a subtle illustration of the insatiable pursuit of universal human satisfaction. The artist wonders if the biggest consequence or derivative of the materialistic system of consumption is not in fact a well-established coping mechanism, where the feeling of responsibility, helplessness and lack of community in a collapsing world is solved through the establishment of individual instant solutions. She reverses the logic of ignorance, which appears among people immersed in distant states, who satisfy the desire for maximum self-gratification by pouring water on the wheel of capitalism.

Through the playful way of using colourful beams of light and spatial play with cast shadow, the artist uses screen printing to create sophisticated and subtle transfers of crumples, cutouts, remnants, fragments and the order of selected words, which emphasise the relationship between presence and absence, between the meaningful and the trivial. By introducing subtle changes in the structure of sentences and words and their placements, the exhibition establishes an intimate atmosphere, where the posed question resembles a conscious withdrawal – passing into a state of ease, pleasure and reassurance, which merges with the indifference of the answer of materialistic logic.

Ulla Žibert (1988, Trbovlje), mentored by Prof. Jože Barši, graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2015. She works in the field of visual art, mostly in the media of painting and graphics, where she focuses on the reinterpretation of seemingly ordinary everyday phenomena. She builds and develops content that questions the taken-for-grantedness of everyday assumptions and thus introduces both social and ecological issues into her works. She often includes text and wordplay in her works. Through the manipulation of language, she thus creates situations that explore the relationship between language, image and meaning. She presents her works at group and solo exhibitions. For her work, she has received awards and the Grand Prix Ex-tempora Piran, and her work is also included in public and private collections. She lives and works in Trbovlje and Ljubljana.