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Review

One of the best views of Aleksandra Domanović’s show _Mother of This Domain_, while it was featured at Plug In ICA, in Winnipeg, wasn’t from the inside of the gallery. On pitch-black winter afternoons, accidental passersby could experience the piece _Things to Come_ (2014) curiously spilling out of big glass windows on the east side of the exhibition space. From the sidewalk, a set of futuristic images printed onto thin sheets of polyester foil seemed ghostly, and appeared to be violating the familiar physicality of space. Inside, the installation gained some materiality. Hung from the ceiling, about 40 inches apart, soft transparent panels completely filled the room, and allowed just enough space for visitors to walk in between them, and get disoriented by the strange environment. Despite being presented in familiar formats – namely, as installations, sculptures, and video – all five works featured in Domanović’s show possess an uncanny digital dimension, allowing for unexpected connections between facts, probabilities and improbabilities, and generating a rich hypertextual interplay of perspectives.

Named after a 1936 sci-fi film written by H.G. Wells, _Things To Come_ features carefully selected allusions to significant portrayals of women and technology in popular science fiction. One such allusion reproduces an image of the MedPod – a device for automated, generalized surgical procedures that the patient himself operates – from Ridley Scott’s 2012 _Prometheus_. And I do mean _himself_, for when the female protagonist tries to perform a life-saving caesarean on herself, the interface informs her that the machine has been programmed for male bodies only. In Domanović’s work, this notorious enmity between human and machine in sci-fi is rewired back to socio-cultural reality, and exposed largely as a gender tension. This makes sense, considering that not only are most sci-fi films directed by men but most devices are also indeed programmed by men. This tension reaches a culmination in a superimposed detail from the MedPod image, which places a woman quite bluntly in the role of a technological extension, and comes, alarmingly, from a real-life historical document. Sticking out of a slot in the MedPod, as if from a giant typewriter, a copy of a 1938 rejection letter, typed on letterhead adorned with Snow White imagery, confronts the viewer. This letter from Walt Disney Productions advises an aspiring animator, Miss Mary V. Ford, that “women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen as that work is performed entirely by young men.” Apparently, the only acceptable work for women consists of tracing the lines and colouring in, “according to directions.” This precious information-fossil resonatingly conveys the often-neglected aspects of modern knowledge production. Throughout modern history, and still today, women in the technological realm are widely abased to positions of automatic labour, commonly associated with robots. In fact, the word “robot” derives from the Slavic “rob,” meaning slave, and “robota,” meaning forced labour. At this point, the MedPod as typewriter – a technology that introduced women as extensions into the male-only business environment – sends a far-reaching intertextual message.

Aleksandra Domanović was born in the former Yugoslavia, the federation of countries best known for its largely popular form of communism, and brutal wars following the decline of the political system in the ’90s. I was born in Yugoslavia myself, and can confirm that this largely androcentric metanarrative is pretty much all that ended up in history textbooks. In the documentary video _From yu to me_ (2013–2014), Domanović again digs up unexplored archival rarities, this time in connection with the little known establishment of Yugoslavia’s first Internet domain: .yu. Slovenia – the country where the domain was registered – exited the communist party just a few months later, and claimed state independence, precipitating the federation’s breakup. The mother of this domain, honoured in the exhibition title, is Borka Jerman Blažič, who along with another female computer scientist, Mirjana Tasić, was one of the administrators of the domain. Blažič later explained that the domain had to be set up virtually, guerrilla-style, as she was “fighting a war” with the political establishment. Yugoslavian officials were strongly in favour of setting the Internet server either in Belgrade, the federation’s political centre, or in its geographic center, Sarajevo. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the .yu domain lived a turbulent and politically charged life all the way until 2010, when it became the most heavily used top-level domain ever to be deleted. Contrary to common belief, Domanović shows again and again how the web was never a medium detached from systemic corporate and political realms. Furthermore, within such a mass of information created interactively, there are no trivial items. Highly personalized, culturally and contextually specific information constantly resists the standardizing process of so-called globalization.

This theme is restated in Domanović’s _The Future Was at Her Fingertips_ (2013–ongoing), a simple document in the style of museum captions that presents a personalized timeline of locally consequential events and underrepresented turning points in the history of technology. For instance: “1843: Ada Lovelace writes what is considered to be the first computer program,” and “1963: Rajko Tomović develops one of the earliest artificial limbs with a sense of touch known as the ‘Belgrade Hand’.” Domanović often recontextualizes disregarded information with an aim to revive and preserve._Untitled_ (30.111.2010), is a monument to the terminated .yu domain. The relics of the domain’s online life are printed on the sides of tall stacks of office paper, forming embellished cuboidal columns. Appropriately, the piece is available in a downloadable digital file, so that anyone with an ordinary office printer, and a willingness to tinker with the settings, can create their own copies.

During an event in which she was invited to respond to Domanović’s exhibition, artist and academic T.L. Cowan – or rather, her performative alter-ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane – ironically quipped about the _Untitled (30.III.2010)_ that women have finally learned how to use a printer. On a deeper level, however, she was right. By resetting the printer, Domanović manages to use its program in a highly improbable way, subverting the most expected, automatic outcomes embedded in the machine. I can’t think of a better way to resist the increasing tendency towards the standardization and automation of human creativity and knowledge production.

_Mother of This Domain_ was also exhibited at Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square, Oakville March 20 – May 29, 2016

Writer

Performance

issue-130-p62-64.pdf

This article reviews Aleksandra Domanovic’s exhibition Mother of this Domain at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, presented from Sept. 26, 2015- Jan.3, 2016.

Aleksandra Domanović: Mother of This Domain

**Xenia Benivolski** is a writer and curator currently based in Toronto.

The sun’s light undergoes a profound change when it reflects off the moon’s cool surface to reach our planet. Mixed with ambient starlight and the light reflected by the Earth itself, its speed is measured in years. Over the course of each day, the moon surveys our entire Earth, both past and future bouncing off its surface. In countless books and movies, characters wax poetic about looking at the same moon at the same time, as if the celestial body is a mirror where time is of no particular consequence, a fictional portal to another. The sentimental phrase, “When I am looking at the moon, I imagine you looking at the same moon and somehow we are together,” is simultaneously proclaimed by a chorus of many through a long history of fictions, displaced from the real flow of time. It was thus a happy coincidence to find Rodrigo Hernández’ 2014 publication, \_What is the moon?\_[^1] resting on the counter at the entrance to his solo project exhibition curated by Chris Sharp, an American curator who relocated in 2012 from Paris to Mexico City, where he co-directs the small but influential gallery Lulu.

Hernández’s commitment to ambiguity is guided by a sense of responsibility to show his subject from all sides. In his work, he provides a lyrical reading of history as a series of non-linear aesthetic and ideological junctures of time and space, seeking to elaborate on a set of dichotomous assumptions that are inherent to his historical subject. Painted paper sculptures appear to be intricately etched metal plates, flattened by a hammer and covered in silver paint; however, the etched marks turn out to be fingerprints. Resting against the brightly coloured walls, the glimmering pieces depict vague scenes from pre-colonial Mexico. The images directly reference the anthropological illustrations of indigenous, pre-Columbian life that have become the celebrated domain of Mexico City-born artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957).[^2] In the framework of these small, silvery sculptures, figurative elements from Covarrubias’ book, _Indian Art of Mexico and Centroamerica_ (1957), have been conflated with formal aesthetic elements of Italian Futurism, in particular the polemical 1915 text by Italian Futurist poet Marinetti _War, the World’s Only Hygiene_ \[3\] from which the artist borrowed the title of this exhibition: _Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other_.

Rejecting the virtues of the Italian Renaissance, Marinetti announces the arrival of aesthetic liberty, a construct utilized in Hernández’s retrofuturistic reconstruction of the historical visual element “Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be cancelled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater… \[sic\] there is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnels and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.” According to Hernández, Covarrubias similarly quotes a progressive visual ideology that promotes “simplicity and sensual realism in the shapes: vigorous and original concepts” in opposition to the “formalized and rigorous art from the highlands, and the baroque, unbounded art of the lowlands of the classic period, both impregnated with symbolism and ceremonial functionalism.”[^4] This sets up an oppositional premise between ontologies of the tenses, across continents. But the opposite of the moon is neither the sun, nor the Earth. A true dichotomy does not necessarily dictate a common ground. This exhibition conflates radical scenarios perched on the edge of a collective consciousness, only to collapse back into fiction. If both past and future have a historical potential, then the contemporary must lie at their intersection, one that clearly no longer needs to take place in the present tense. A tropic of contemporaneity turns out to be where such radicality is asserted through fictions. Both risking and resisting a nostalgia for an ideological now, the work addresses the contemporary historical subject in a nuanced way, propelling the _geodesic spacetime dynamic_ into an aesthetic that hosts a life of its own.

This combination is arresting in its flattening of not only the physical sculptural form but also of perspective and history itself. Citing a bird’s-eye view of pre-hispanic Mexican depictions of Indigenous living, seen through the lens of divisionist cubist perspectives that were prominent in post-World War I Europe, the aesthetic is obtained through the mechanization of production and the influence of photography. The meeting of these visual forms sets up a strange epistemological ground, breeding a serendipitous dynamic of human history through time: a history repeating variations on the manifestation of radical language and symbolism. Within this landscape, Hernández is a witness to a vastly different array of characters all singing the same song.

[^1]: “What is the moon?” is an adolescent and romantic question according to writer and curator Arnisa Zeqo, and the impetus for this publication: an appendix to an exhibition by the same name, held at the Bonnefantenmuseum  
in Maastricht. The four-page foldout was produced by Jon Frenken and edited by Hernández at the Charles Nypels Lab of the Jan Van Eyck Academie of Maastricht, Netherlands, 2014–2015, supported by the JVE Academie and the Laurenz-Haus Stiftung Basel.
[^2]: José Miguel Covarrubias, _Indian Art of Mexico & Central America_, New York: (Knopf, 1957) Mexico.
[^3]: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the World’s Only Hygiene) (1915), in Opere di F.T. Marinetti, vol. 2: Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Mondadori, Milan, 1968).
[^4]: Oliver Martínez- Kandt, “Go, Gentle Scorpio,” February 2015, Terremoto, Mexico City.

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This article reviews Rodrigo Hernández’s exhibition every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other presented at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City from Feb. 6 – March 17, 2016.

Rodrigo Hernández: every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other

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