Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.
Center in Galerija P74
Prušnikova 74, 1000 Ljubljana
www.zavod-parasite.si

The video art of Maja Hodošček  – who, as the winner of the 2010 OHO Award, is now presenting her work at the P74 Gallery – focuses for the most part on seemingly peripheral but extremely delicate personal and social themes. Hodošček is particularly interested in questions related to the position of people who have been shoved to the margins in the interest of ruling capital. In her earlier works, the artist dealt with such topics as migrant workers (Promised Land, 2010, for which she won the OHO Award), the elderly (Landscape, 2009–2010), consumerism and desires as artificial needs (Instant Happiness, 2008), and militarism (Raw Material, 2010). In the present exhibition, in her two video works “Right, Wrong Corrective” (2009) and “If you want to get an answer, you have to ask me a question” (2011), she examines in particular some of the more private aspects of these social issues. Here she treats the very personal questions of the individual’s view on such notions as happiness, desires, dreams, and expectations, and the personal freedom that results. She tries to present the issue in all its potential relativity; for this reason, she does not develop it in any categorical way, but rather pursues it in two directions. The exhibition is conceived in two parts, which through the conceptual connection between the two projections are joined into a single story – a story that also, consequently, touches on questions of stigma and conflicted inner feelings of (dis‑)comfort, pain, and pleasure. The artist’s video production navigates the border between documentation and a subtle, aesthetically conceived poetics of the self, and in doing so also seeks to achieve a provocative balance between what is filmed and what is authentic, between the actual and the virtual, between the real and the utopian. Barbara Sterle Vurnik (curator).

Maja Hodošček is currently (2012)studying at the DAI.