Dalibor Polivka
Ufora's Imaginary Museum (Le Musée Imaginaire )
Contemporary with what? — has become the question of the day. The most advanced contemporary artists now express ideas bigger than themselves. The Anthropocene has provoked a crisis of consciousness as artists engage with other forms of life. At the same time, all the old assumptions about art are critiqued as art history’s treasure trove of images is raided to say what needs to be said. There is no longer an ineluctable forward march of art history, but something has changed again, altering our perspective on the past. The postmodern condition cannot be easily wished away — or today’s crisis of human scale that causes us to ask: what is real?
UFORA’S IMAGINARY MUSEUM is a project of Rob Mintz and Dalibor Polivka, exploring individual art history territories; formal and conceptual possibilities; symbioses and adversity of cultural spaces; and modes of artistic expressions of sociocene, capitalocene in the era of the colonization of the universe.
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first suggested the idea of a “universal festival,” and Foucault who later described it. But not until You First (UFORA’s project underwritten by Nicolas Bourriaud) in 2008, were these visions made a reality by the participation of a cadre of idiosyncratic non-conformists from the nation’s top art schools who – in a wide-ranging October exhibition – forever shifted the discourse toward art’s farthest shores.
Dalibor Polivka's central idea for UIM.
A central idea of these installations and paintings is based on the act of conceptual cancellation. Deconstruction of stereotypes attacks various facets of the sociocene (diferent facets of social life): extraterrestrial colonial adventures, history of religion, consecration of power, ideology of beauty, and return to origins.
1. Flags of the province of all mankind.
(PoAM) are imaginary symbols that represent the impossible dream of social and spiritual cohesion, without the false values of “totalization.” The X - based design suggests an allusion to the history of the church. Flags of PoAM are tools which legitimize territorial behaviour and colonial adventure of outer space by sci-fi evangelists.
2. Invisible Dwellings “Museums without walls”.
Artificial teepee tent - like structures are manifestations of fake neo-traditional rituals, detached from history, origins, and natural environment. They are a reaction to the shift in function of original dwellings as places for daily living, reduced today to pretentious ceremonial purposes.
3. Thermal Blankets, the art of survival and the origins of art.
Archaeological evidence shows that our ancestors had the ability to create art much earlier in evolution than is suggested by current knowledge of art-related artifacts. A warmth - preserving foil protects the proto-art’s fundamental function of survival, yet to be discovered.
4. Fire pits.
Sound installation, calling for a return to origins.
5. Chromium Oxide. The end of artistic tyranny.
Artwork is reduced to representation of a formal element, to limit its expected functions. Exhibiting a formal property and application of chromium oxideis a way of stripping the artwork of its artistic dress. This reduces the importance of cultural context and allows biographical and historic manipulation.