Petra Feriancova

Petra Feriancova is a Slovak contemporary artist, writer and curator. She was born in Bratislava, former Czechoslovakia in 1977. In 2003 she graduated from Fine Art at the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Rome. She was awarded the Oskár Čepan Award in 2010. Her work has shown internationally in many exhibitions. She has had solo exhibitions at Fondazione Morra Greco, (Naples, 2014), ISCP, International studio & curatorial program (New York, 2011), House of Arts Brno (2012), Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava, 2011), Moravian Gallery (Brno, 2008). Her work has also been featured in many group exhibitions. At BWA (Wroclaw, 2011), Sztuki Museum Łódź,(2011), Vienna Secession (Vienna, 2010), Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne (2008) and many others. In 2013 Petra Feriancova represented Czech and Slovak Republic at 55th Venice Biennial with the project "Still the Same Place".

Petra Feriancova works in the intentions of post-production. The key moment of her work is the conceptualization of her own emotional reactions to the processes of perception and memory as well as an examination of the circumstances under which they are shared. She works mostly with already existing images and texts, which she interprets and methodically interchanges. The main aim of this form of manipulation with a pictorial or discursive reference is to provide the spectator with the original affective reaction. Each new realization leans towards a kind of implied connection between the universe of unique personal experience and the impersonal processes of individualization, which is conditioned by civilization, history and culture. Forms, images and vestiges of the fleeting past (family archives, repertoires of historical genres, symbols and discourses) are embraced even in the full awareness that their original meaning has long since degraded or disintegrated, proliferating those areas of indeterminacy which require – even if tentatively, by dint of improvising – being amended and filled with new meaning. Only then, even at the cost of the alienation and distortion of the "original" meaning, may one accept their own version of the world, and by doing so simultaneously open it to others. The process of the socialization or instrumentalization of the subjective, and at the same time, the purely personal interiorization of external contents - the process of mutual alienation as a condition for attributing and renewing meaning - is essentially present as a theme in each and every work by Petra Feriancová, in the form of minor epiphanies, glimpses of understanding, and revelations which cannot be transferred by simple explanation.

Life and work

Petra Feriancová was born in Bratislava on the 10th of May 1977 to an architect, Doc. Ing. Arch. Dušan Ferianc, and medical doctor, MUDr. Mária Feriancová. She has three daughters: Carlotta Joffe, Marina Torri and Federica Torri. She studied at SSUV from 1991 to 1995, at the department for advertising art, subsequently she was accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, which she later left to study at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Roma, graduating in 2003. She is currently pursuing a PhD. in the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, at the IN Studio.

At her first solo show in Rome in 2001 (Valentina Moncada Gallery), Feriancová exhibited large-scale analogue photographs taken with a disposable camera, which she developed herself. The artist equates the decision to limit herself in the production process to an attempt to relate to the general public, whereas in her opinion the true art form arises in the process of post-production. The final selection relates to the complex culture and history of an image; its tradition in painting, literary and film references. By choosing a technologically limiting media, such as a disposable camera, the artist demonstrates the insignificance of technical preparation in relation to the outcome and the piece itself. The origin is just as insignificant and so is the original authorship of the material being manipulated.

In her work To Whom it May Concern (2006; part of the exhibition By the Way in Jiri Svestka Gallery in Prague) Feriancová worked with correspondence; letters, which she had not authored. She collected this archive of correspondence in the time period of 2000 – 2004. The result was a three channel video, in which the text fully replaced the image. The film consists of an edited selection of love letters; this edit formally evoked the film rhetoric and it contained the aforementioned diary entries of the author of the letters. It was a re-reading of a relationship, which had already come to a close, using words of the other individual in the relationship. A participatory project, where Feriancová asked a Norwegian artist Jesper Alvaer based in Prague to collaborate, was also a part of the exhibition. She sent him footage depicting mostly holiday scenes, which she had filmed herself without the intention of creating an artwork. The denial of authorship, or rather borrowing and post-producing unoriginal content into an artwork; a process related to the already mentioned first work by Feriancová (Grand Tour , 2001), where she travelled all around Italy.

In 2008 Feriancová worked with a family archive for an exhibition in Galéria Médium, in Bratislava, which was an exhibition accompanying the Oskar Čepan Award, an award awarded annually in Slovakia for outstanding endeavor in contemporary art. The artist formally reduced her work to a format not exceeding an A4. The intention was not only to attain a formal solidity of many works, but it was also a reaction to the competition format of the exhibition, within which she wanted to limit herself to set a handicap. Similarly to the way an extra weight is given to the favorite to win in a horse race. The solution was an installation, formally determined so that the dimensions of the work would not exceed an A4 format. A light box measuring 21 x 30 cm was placed inside the installation and on top of it three negatives with the title From my grandfather, his daughter, her brother (i.e. Feriancová’s father) and her daughter. The criteria for the selection were relationships and family ties, which generated the title of the object. Later Feriancová chose to work with photographs from her father’s travels to Rome and all of Italy after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when the borders opened in 1969. It was important for her considering she had lived in this city for several years and this journey of her father was for her, as Feriancová herself states, a return but at the same time also a new encounter with a city, through her father’s experiences.

In 2008 Feriancová began to work with the archive of her aunt, a professor of ornithology. The archive is a part of a large quantity of diapositives, shots from her aunt’s travels around East Africa (in the period between 1970 – 1972). This journey was mostly a holiday, but these shots appear to be more of a research or rather a true passion for her profession. Most of the images peers towards the sky - capturing the birdlife of East Africa. Feriancová has sorted her archive according to regions (the various biotopes of birds). She began to consult her aunt; the birds’ capacity to react, to adapt to change that occurs within them. Feriancová’s solo eponymous solo exhibition in Moravian Gallery , which was on that same year, also dealt with natural selection. One part of the installation was a carousel projection, where individual slides (images of birdlife) from the archive were replaced by a written description of sound - birdsong. Another part of the installation was the archive of Feriancová’s grandfather Oskar Ferianc, also a professor of zoology, who in the period between 1948 and 1962 collected photographic material for his publication about new species of pigeons. Passionate cultivators from across Europe would contribute with their photographs, which illustrated the results of their breeding endeavors. Some photographs were directly taken by the cultivators some were commissioned, professional photographs taken in a studio. Every photograph came from another province, some were retouched directly with a paintbrush, to fall under strict criteria of their owner. The installation of the original vintage photographs, entitled Creator, entails an ambitious outcome of cultivators; it demonstrates the physiognomic changes in the species during a short period of time (i.e. one generation or less) and their resistance towards the theory of natural selection and evolution generating long-term changes. The work Creator manifests the human desire to impede the concept of time, or more precisely, to live eternally. The photographs reveal the various minuscule differences between the species of birds; the new aesthetic yet non-functional qualities of stirpiculture.

Another part of this exhibition is another initiation by Feriancova; a collection of texts from a number of artists entitled I asked my friends to describe an artwork to me 2007. In 2006 she devised a collection of texts, short messages (mostly via email), where she asked her friends, artists to describe a work of art of their own choosing. It was during a period, during which she willingly chose to refrain from going to exhibitions testing the limits and opportunities of a lived mediated experience.

Footnotes

    http://moussemagazine.it/55vb-czechoslovak-pavilion/

    http://www.moussepublishing.com/products-page/product/petra-feriancova-index/

    http://www.iscp-nyc.org/events/archive/exhibitions/598/petra-feriancova-theory-of-a-city-or-the-possibilities-of-an-a4.html

    http://www.moravska-galerie.cz/moravska-galerie/vystavy-a-program/aktualni-vystavy/2008/petra-feriancova-prirozeny-vyber.aspx?lang=en

    http://www.valentinamoncada.com/mostre/eng/2001-02_Feriancova_Lilliputtania.html

    External links

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