Michelle Deignan

Present State
Present State was an exhibition curated by Michelle Deignan at Five Years gallery in 2007, featuring works by artists Jasmina Cibic and Pete Moss. Both artists' practices foreground infiltration as an artistic strategy, creating photographic and video works which playfully re-configure existing apparatuses of authority, in the creation of the artists' own counter myths.

The images in this exhibition were captured in various sites and situations in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Slovenia is the economic front-runner of the countries that joined the European Union in 2004. In 'Present State' the artists use this fertile ground of national re-invention, specifically addressing the use of event, pose and uniform as evidence of authority

Works by Jasmina Cibic focus on the primary site of international arrival and departure from the country's capital, Joze Pucnik Ljubljana Airport. On the 11th and 12th of July 2007, as part of her site specific intervention at the airport, Cibic got the Slovene Police Orchestra to perform a newly commissioned arrangement of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love". Her choice of song reflects the words of a new Slovenian national slogan, recently coined by a government think tank. Along with video documentation of one of these performances, Cibic exhibits a large scale photographic image of a uniformed brass band, flanking a red carpet entrance to a plane sitting on an one of the airport's runways.

Pete Moss's works create a photographic visual fantasy in which as he plays the role of journalist/television presenter, interviewing members of the Slovenian artist group 'Passaporta'. In these scenes, photographed in a Slovenian television studio, the members of 'Passaporta', wear costumes combining military and airline uniform designs which were originally created for use in the group's performances, photographic and video works. Emulating the poses used in classic TV studio programmes, Moss as "the presenter" re-configures Passaporta's fictional world with his new meta-fiction.