Large photographs of landscapes from abandoned mines and a video installation with helmets and a game of pelivans are complimentary to this video projection that intersects the whole concept of the Landscape Experience exhibition. It connects the previous artistic experience of both authors, the frames from all the locations, the theme of war and toxic suffering, the issue of the environment and man, violence and peace. In the thematic dialogue of the video sequence, along with the performative appearance of the authors themselves, the sound also plays a crucial part through the alternating appearance of metal helmets hitting each other as they roll through the rocks and the sound of the wind carrying toxic dust indicating an uncertain future. With their video artwork, Monika Moteska and Robert Jankuloski create a certain time-space and intergenerational line which indicates the breadth of the critical artistic concept and thinking about possible alternatives that lie ahead.
Contrary to the difficult topic, the author’s aspiration is to present everything in a beautified way and on the verge of kitsch. The beauty of the landscape is overemphasized and without knowing the socio-historical context, the scenes seem idealised and desirable to the observer at first glance, as highly artistically aestheticized objects. Or, like pictures in the mass media, on social networks that provide a false picture of everyday activities and a happy life. The question of dehumanisation of the modern subject lies not in recognising the difference between fact and fiction (abolition of the reality of experience) and the difference between correct and false (abolition of norms of thought), which makes it susceptible to destructive manipulations and passivation of critical thinking. The authors connect the problematisation of beauty in art with the dichotomy of good and evil, true and false, credible and distorted in art and social reality.
Monika Moteska and Robert Jankuloski address modern society and raise the question of the collective attitude not only towards historical memory, as it is presented in modern media and narratives, but also of the social power relations that lead to trauma and poisoning, both natural and human. It is a critical use of landscape in contemporary art practice which the authors bring to our attention, places of nature’s devastation by man, whether it is war or excavation of mineral resources, and calls into question the collective picture of past, present and future. They critically look at history through the human need to subdue and tame nature, which is related to the thesis of the banality of evil by Hannah Arendt (in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963), that the greatest evil was not committed by those who are evil by nature, sociopaths, fanatics, but those who only deeply lack self-conscious thinking and reasoning, obedient people who unconditionally obey the hierarchical structures, laws and institutions of the state of totalitarian systems, who transfer complicity without personal responsibility to the whole society.