There are various types of social interaction – accidental, repeated, regular, regulated, etc. The way people from certain social groups communicate and interact with each other creates the illusion of a common social order and shared reliability. However, this does not mean and does not guarantee complete understanding and corresponding perspectives between the subjects.
In “Stuck Keys” Anna Vasof and Violeta Ivanova examine the principles of reluctance or inability of social exchange between individuals (members and outsiders) on one hand and between them and the system itself on the other. As the title suggests, the exhibition gravitates around situations that might lead to a dead end, with few chances of progress; from internal communication barriers to passive and active ways of avoiding contact with the other and otherness, the works present a multifaceted range of personal experiences and observations on social mechanisms.
Anna Vasof is an architect and media artist. Born in 1985, she studied architecture at the University of Thessaly in Greece and Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2004 her videos and short movies have been presented in several festivals, some of them winning distinctions. She’s currently writing a Ph.D. thesis about an animation technique that she develops and at the same time working on designing and building innovative mechanisms for producing critical and narrative videos, actions and installations. Vasofs work is accessible in a universal way via its wit and mischief. It is grounded in genuine experimentation of the core mechanisms of motion and time based art. Her Non-Stop Stop-Motion works reinvent a contemporary expanded cinema, deal with the poetic mechanics of persistence of vision and social paradoxes and let us see a familiar world from a different perspective.
Violeta Ivanova is born in Bulgaria, 1985. After her study in the National Academy of Arts, Sofia/Bulgaria, she graduated with a Master degree in Sculptural Conceptions/Ceramics at the University for Art and Design, Linz/Austria. In her projects she interweaves personal experiences and observations on the nature of things and human beings. She experiments with unconventional materials and uses a broad range of media. In parallel to her individual projects, Ivanova often collaborates with artists from different fields. Despite the variety of expressive means and themes, her works bear a common characteristic feature – the use of metaphors and indirect messages that invite the viewer for deeper reflection and interpretation.