Art Critics' Choice ...
Igor Štromajer: 101.72 MB

The wall-mounted composition is distinctive both in form and in concept. The artist refers to the individual pieces as "frames", as if attempting to deny the objects any artistic or symbolic value, while in fact emphasising – through aestheticisation and the narrative behind the framed fragments – precisely their artistic and symbolic nature.

The frames contain detritus – or rather, the vestiges of the infrastructure that carried and transmitted information and data, forming the material foundation for artworks staged within the ubiquitous medium of the internet. In 2011, the artist ritually deleted these artworks from the server and titled this act of performance art Expunction. The veneration of ruins has played an important role in European culture and art since the Renaissance and, in the 19th century with Romanticism, charting a form of spirituality that moved away from God while retaining notions of infinity and the incomprehensible. The works of art that once existed within these machines no longer survive, at least not in their original forms. They might be reconstructed in a museum or restoration context, or reinterpreted in a manner akin to musicians performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions on instruments that did not exist in the 18th century. Perhaps.

The wall-mounted composition consists of 18 (originally 20) carefully arranged and framed hardware fragments, along with a conditionally anthropomorphic robot. With its frontal presence, the robot is distinctly totemic, an idol of sorts. The frames, mounted in what seems a haphazard manner, appear to defy gravity, floating in their own cloud, a stellar nebula, and constitute the infinity and indeterminacy that lend meaning to a static figure.

Štromajer has distributed nearly all of the frames among friends and acquaintances whom he trusts to safeguard them with care and mindfulness, thereby creating a unique network of custodians. These individual frames, held in private collections, most likely hang on walls perfectly vertical in the manner of traditional pictures, thus becoming icons that – like fragments of a hologram – symbolically contain within them the whole from which they originate.