Human Resource or Zoran and Goran is a performative human sculpture specifically conceived for Northwest by Southeast. Two men selected randomly from workers walking the streets of Skopje in search of work. They were solely employed for the purpose of pumping air simultaneously into and out of an inflatable mattress. This highly strenuous act accompanied by wheezing and squealing sounds produced by air pumped through a valve and sucked out again underpinned the futility of effort. Paid the same wages as they would have probably received for illegal labour in Vienna, their work however achieved no results as the mattress never became entirely inflated nor entirely deflated despite their untiring efforts.
Fingerprint – The Back of the Front
Nita Tandon’s installation Fingerprint makes the discrepancy between the digitalised and therefore endlessly reproducible graphic image and the uniqueness of an analogue picture visible.
In the act of pressing each pixel onto a glass pane, the artist leads the scan of the fingerprint back to its analogue ascription. The process is a game of definitions played with the viewer in which they are forced to choose between analogue/digital, two-dimensional/three-dimensional, front/back.
As a consequence, the fingerprint – depicted on the entire surface – is left on each and every part of the picture, making the front the back and vice versa. In this process of transfer, where Plasticine and finger make physical and material contact, both bodies overlap and intermesh; identification becomes manifest in both its figurative and concrete sense.
Epitomised as a determinant of identity, the fingerprint becomes the object of questions concerning originality and seriality.
Daniel Wisser, 2010