Pendulum is a mechanical installation producing an illusion of the image as well as giving a contemporary interpretation of kinetic-art sculpture − specifically, the latter refers to Duchamp's Rotorelief. The machine is constructed according to a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum (1842). The beginning of the story is portrayed in the movement of the Pendulum swaying from side to side; in this work, the image is produced not by a swinging motion but by the powerful circular rotation of LED diodes. The algorithm for calculating the distance in relation to speed in a circular movement is more complex than the one Jahić used for her previous machine Scanner III where the movement is vertical. The image simultaneously appears and disappears. Another literary reference behind the work is the brutal machine in Franz Kafka's The Penal Colony (1914). It shows the artist's back scarred with the Harrow in the same way as The Officer in The Penal Colony inscribes the laws into the bodies of The Condemned, as society inscribes its rules onto our identities.
Excerpt from the text “Sanela Jahić: Cerebral Values of Mechanical Beauty” by Ida Hiršenfelder, published in Passengers from the Absolute to the Relative (Publication Studio), 2011.
technical support: Andrej Primožič, Janez Zupan
Sanela Jahić (SI)
Sanela Jahić (1980) studied painting on the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. During her study at the Academy she started to question the concept of “traditional painting” and put her thoughts down in a dissertation entitled “The social subject in the kinetic object”. In 2010 she finished the MFA degree in the international program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, with a thesis on Fire Painting. In her work she raises such questions as: What happens if a painting is no longer an independent, self-contained position, bound by standstill, unalterability and light in situ? How is one to open new possibilities for painting and the image as a message and a surface? Jahić thus fabricates kinetic objects/machines, which produce and manipulate phantasmagoric images. The images speak of the social subject living in the technological and, as it is called, thepost-ideological era. To realize and complete her work, she often collaborates with specialists and companies in the fields of electronics, software, automation and mechanical engineering.
Her work has been presented at the exhibition Art of Engineering in Technical Museum, Berlin, 2010; Qui Vive?, 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art – Glob(E)Scape at ARTPLAY Center, Moscow, 2010; Kapelica Gallery, 2010/2011; Appendix Project Space, Portland, 2011; Pixxelpoint / New Media Art Festival in City Gallery, Nova Gorica, 2011; Drawing in the Age of Electronic Expressions, LEAP / Transmediale, Berlin, 2012; Robot Museum, A+A Gallery, Venice, 2012.
www.sanelajahic.blogspot.com
sanela.jahich@gmail.com
