Artist: Petra Feriancová
Exhibition title: I am losing my beauty together with my interest in beautiful things
Venue: BARIL, Cluj, Romania
Date: June 1 – July 9, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and BARIL
: BARIL proudly presents the solo show by the Petra Feriancová: I am losing my beauty together with my interest in beautiful things. The exhibition will be opened between 1st of June and 9th of July 2018.
“Petra Feriancova works in the intentions of post-production. The key moment of her work is the conceptualization of her own emotional reactions to the processes of perception and memory as well as an examination of the circumstances under which they are shared. She works mostly with already existing images, texts which she interprets and methodically interchanges. The main aim of this form of manipulation with a pictorial or discursive reference is to provide the spectator with the original affective reaction. Each new realization leans towards a kind of implied connection between the universe of unique personal experience and the impersonal processes of individualization, which is conditioned by civilization, history and culture. Forms, images and vestiges of the fleeting past (family archives, repertoires of historical genres, symbols and discourses) are embraced even in the full awareness that their original meaning has long since degraded or disintegrated, proliferating those areas of indeterminacy which require – even if tentatively, by dint of improvising – being amended and filled with new mffeaning. Only then, even at the cost of the alienation and distortion of the “original” meaning, may one accept their own version of the world, and by doing so simultaneously open it to others. The process of the socialization or instrumentalization of the subjective, and at the same time, the purely personal interiorization of external contents – the process of mutual alienation as a condition for attributing and renewing meaning – is essentially present as a theme in each and every work by Petra Feriancová, in the form of minor epiphanies, glimpses of understanding, and revelations which cannot be transferred by simple explanation.” (Marek Pokorny, 2013)
Petra Feriancová (b 1977 Bratislava, Slovakia) lives and works in Bratislava SK and Milan IT. She was accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava SK, which she left for the Accademia delle Belle Arti, Roma IT, graduating in 2003. She holds a PhD since 2016 from the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, SK.
In 2013, she represented Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the 55th Biennial of Venice with the project titled An Order of Things. In 2011 she was a resident at ISCP, New York US, and in 2010, she was awarded the Oskar Cepan Prize for young visual artists organised by the FCS Foundation for a Civil Society.
Repetition is happiness.
Someone said.
My first ex-husband possibly. Or was it Henry Miller?
There is no reason.
Just other ways of measuring.
For the two lines on the test, and the other two from a smile, for some weight in the cheeks.
Hydras are immortal.
But those who reproduce die.
The blood runs down my eyelid.
Skin,
At first beautifully white and a little tight, then the eye turns purple and the cheek remains green.
Repetition is happiness.
I am here to function. We all are.
A constant need for utility.
Even though my reproductive function is coming to an end.
I can see the plants growing from behind the window,
But I can’t listen to the wind.
I am the mother of three.
Condemned to never-ending fear.
I have two working hours daily.
Sometimes, after a long time, I get out and I cry on the stairs by the rubbish bins, overwhelmed by the beauty of reality.
I am losing my beauty together with the interest for beautiful things.
The outside world does not exist.
Or it already filled her up so much, that she is happy hidden inside.
Instead of eyes two volcanoes.
Sometimes an eruption.
Still seeing, though.
If they cut you in half, which part hurts more?
The one you lost?
or
the one you lost?
She spreads her heart on the hot toast, it is a little slippery, but supple, the blood blackens from the heat.
It is a bit like liver, greasy with blood clots, which she has not bought at the butcher’s for a long time, because he did not like it.
Her first operation was over.
The stitches are like thin spider’s legs, which climb from the folds of the skin, so reddish-yellowish like a bad Xerox.
A bound pupa, a thread of blood clots around it, which held it firmly tied to the Fallopian tube.
She was bleeding into her abdomen for so long until she started bleeding on the outside too.
She woke up,
and did not sleep any of the following days and nights at the hospital.
She was happy to be.
The day after tomorrow
they will take out the spider’s legs from her abdomen. \
Gradually retreat from the world.
I must stay.
Animals seek solitude when injured.
I will stay.
And move me if it has to be, but only business trips
Still seeing, though.
If they cut you in half, which part hurts more?
The one you lost?
or
the one you lost?
She spreads her heart on the hot toast, it is a little slippery, but supple, the blood blackens from the heat.
It is a bit like liver, greasy with blood clots, which she has not bought at the butcher’s for a long time,
because he did not like it.
I love my family, my work peace, then dinner, sex etc.
I don’t want more.
But don’t lie to me, don’t steal from me, don’t brag and don’t take away my dignity.
Illusions.
Her first operation was over.
The stitches are like thin spider’s legs, which climb from the folds of the skin, so reddish-yellowish like a bad Xerox.
A bound pupa, a thread of blood clots around it, which held it firmly tied to the Fallopian tube.
She was bleeding into her abdomen for so long until she started bleeding on the outside too.
She woke up,
and did not sleep any of the following days and nights at the hospital.
She was happy to be.
The day after tomorrow they will take out the spider’s legs from her abdomen. \
Gradually retreat from the world.
I must stay.
Animals seek solitude when injured.
I will stay.
And move me if it has to be, but only business trips.
