Artwork “Cut Out” by Ben Cain and Tina Gverović was created during online residency

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art has launched in December the first online KAMOV residency. Ben Cain and Tina Gverović created the artwork Cut Out available on a specially designed webpage.

With the uncertain date of going back to normal, at the moment when the organization of regular residencies and travels is especially challenging, we hosted Ben Cain, Tina Gverović and Tanja Vrvilo at creative online residency. We invited artist to join us from their homes or temporary home offices and to propose text based works, visual essays, research scraps, notes, thoughts, sounds, images, propositions, experiments, works in progress or finished works. In doing so, they could relate the topic of their residency to the contradiction between something that is planned and something that is unforeseeable, examine the issues, history and contexts in the background of the museum’s work, neighborhood or the city, as well as interpret the thematic framework through the prism of everydayness and unveil the historical narratives, correlations and projections.

For the artwork Cut Out Ben Cain and Tina Gverović created a specific graphic interface at which they uploaded text, drawings, photographs and videos available on a specially designed webpage: https://mmsu.hr/kamov-online/. In order to fully experience the artwork please click on the windows to enlarge and run the content.

Below you can read artists’ statement and description of the artwork.

If It Happens Let It

A series of combinations of moving and still images that overlay the processes of fabrication, product, and worker. We’re working primarily with images of hands and arms, various patterned fabrics, and found clips of weaving machines. The process of layering these three elements, and interchanging product for worker, fabrication for product etc. results in various images and short videos, and some digression, but much of the work is tied together through thinking about people not as things and objects but rather as powerful and vulnerable subjects.

Cut out, cut up, cut back, jump cuts.

Moving cut-n-paste body parts (hands, arms) are placed on patterned fabric backgrounds, which are in turn placed on looped clips of fast-moving machine parts. Bodies flattened out, becoming patterns, abstractions and attractions. The images, with their pretty textures and colours might be displaying things for ‘viewing pleasure’, to be desired, to be consumed.

Aimlessly performing, or goal-less working. Aimless isn’t really the right word. There are ‘aims’, but they’re not necessarily immediately understandable or recogniseable. The aim might be for a body to move freely, fluidly, awkwardly, but without a strict sense of purpose or outcome.

We are not a thing – that’s a pretty inane statement? We know that bodies shouldn’t be treated as raw material, but they often are.

The bodies, or body-parts seen in these images and videos might come across as uncanny raw material that’s aimlessly doing its own thing, equally they might be cut-off things incessantly labouring even without having any clearly defined work to do or objective in mind.

The intentions involved in combining moving-image parts of people next to photos of fabric next to video clips of machinery next to spoken or written text next to… aren’t necessarily fully resolved; and although we might be thinking about how bodies might explore and enjoy their own possibilities of movement (however micro), and how they might be co-opted, unwilling participants in other people’s narratives and work regimes, packaged and promoted… we’re not sure yet if or how any of that will be tangible in what we make during the residency.

Ben Cain/Tina Gverović

 

video/sound editing: Josipa Miličević

sound design: Ilia Gverović Cain

web assistance and interface design: Mihael Giba

thanks to: Goran Ferčec

London/Rijeka, 2020.