Attraction. Petrification develops the theme of human-stone hybridity. It realizes its manifestation through several variations and media: performative video,  abstract sound composition, and a series of prints of processual-performative images.

The artist explores human-stone hybridity – that strange otherness of radically intimate proximity – through performative collaboration with entities radically different from herself (or so it seems at first glance). The immobile stone entities, with their eonian persistence in a seemingly unchanging pose,  emanate a field, a kind of tidal wave, which gently but persistently attracts much more malleable life forms. She uses the camera (sound, video, photography) to record what is happening: how her body reacts and behaves in a specific geological formation, how the subtle oscillations of the latter affect performative coexistence. The second axis cyclically unfolds in an intimate space. The creation of processual images with a scanner, mirror, stones and her own body follows the light of the lunation and the cycles of cosmic sequences in time (full/new moon), responding to each period's emotional states and creative moods as encouraged by the moonlight or its absence. The sound field – the connective tissue between the elements – invites you to the intermediate (sub)sound substrate of minerals and liquids, to a deep listening of the elements. Sound has direct access to the human interior and seeks resonant harmonies. In the process of creative encounter, the elements create new fields of synchronization, intermediate bodies blossom, and eavesdropping/appearances of subtle manifestations of ambient spirits, atmospheres with light and shadow emerge.

The inspiration for the exhibition Attraction. Petrification is the creative attraction between rocks and human. The artist draws attention to the intuition that human is not only close to animals and plants, but the closeness descends much deeper, into the inorganic, the  mineral, and extends timelessly into the cosmic. The friendship between my hand and this stone enacts an ancient and undeniable eros, the affinity of matter with itself (David Abram, Becoming Animal; An Earthly Cosmology). The performative practice with the elements is based on processuality, on deepening and expanding the perceptual field. Attraction. Petrification offers a process of attunement with the elements, this time with rocks.

http://www.kibla.org/en/sections/artkit/2022/or-poiesis-aka-petra-kaps-attraction-petrification/ 

Production: Petra Kapš in collaboration with ACE KIBLA
The project is supported by the Municipality of Maribor and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

opening on Friday, 29 April 2022, at 6 p.m. at the artKIT gallery, Maribor
 solo exhibition with performative video, immersive sound composition, series of prints of processual-performative images