IZIS Festival www.festival-izis.org
IZIS is an annual event and exhibition that showcases innovative, internationally recognised audio-visual and new media art. It traces its origins to 2013, when a group of artists, cultural producers, and poets who work in the Istria region formed an initiative. Since then, it has spread to movie theatres, galleries, public spaces, and industrial buildings. In its quest to involve intermedia artists into the programmes of local venues, it has successfully navigated hesitation and rebellion, institutionalisation, and guerrilla manoeuvres. Named after Isis, the goddess mother, the goddess of women and childbirth, IZIS endeavours to present contemporary artistic practices. And it strives to overcome the centralisation of the cultural and artistic space in Slovenia by opening itself to audiences in the periphery, i.e. in Istria, where it has found a home with the help or the individuals and institutions that drive it forward. Or to paraphrase a poem by Miklavž Komelj, who reinterpreted the "Mysteries of Isis" – to preclude the disjointed centre and periphery remaining as the natural state of things: "Isis has found all / the parts. / The originally existing / is beyond wholeness. / Proclus calls for consecration / into all mysteries / How disjointing in reverse / evokes parts of the whole / that was disjointed". (Miklavž Komelj, The Night is More Abstract than n, p. 42, Hyperion, 2014). And not just that: it is also to preclude the illusion of a whole that we must defend, and, in the name thereof, ostracise. Through the lens of extraordinary works of art, IZIS explores the impact of technology on culture, society, and nature. At the same time, it broadens horizons and brings together artists, thinkers, and inquisitive crowds through a prism of experiences and complex questions concerning the impact of robotics, hybrid materials, and kinetic sculptures. Up until 2018 the festival was held around Izola. It was staged at the Monfort salt warehouse in Portorož in 2019 and at the Libertas salt warehouse in Koper in 2020.
Marko Vivoda, Karlo Hmeljak, Luka Frelih: REAR – Reality in Arbitrariness Intermedia installation: 5’ Music: Matej Bonin Production: Borut Jerman – KID PiNA Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Speculum Artium, Ljudmila
The intermedia installation REAR – Reality in Arbitrariness harmoniously overlaps three different media – language, image, and sound – in its montage, whereby each medium is split into its constituent parts or elements, which then form a new set at another level. In this new set, the elements begin to take on a telling expression that shows that the construction of 11
