Concerned with the idea of homeland as someone living abroad and through reflecting and exploring my own identity as a Slovenian and Slav the video animation relates to my artist books, where I am in a similar matter using images from my snapshots of architecture, situations and objects, as well as snapshots of my painting practice, and then putting them into sequences. Out of a large amount of collected materials, I chose pictures, to which I felt especially emotionally attached. Feelings like nostalgia, melancholy, loss, are in an abstract way woven into the symbols and situations; Video is presented as a large-scale projection, taking up the whole wall and creating a specific atmosphere. Animated imagery and symbols do not transmit a clear narrative, yet they transfer the mood and hypnotize the viewer to dive into a constructed world - a place that does not exist (anymore).

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Apart from his homeland, separated from the sources of his Slovenian and Slavic identity, Vienna based artist Gašper Kunšič mines archives of architectural ruins, symbology and craft practices, resurfacing, repurposing and breathing new life into forgotten fragments of a national consciousness. Animated with heavily surrealistic overtones ‘AWKWARD SILENCE’ forms a sequential scenography, backdrops and props which are manoeuvred in and out of frame, a stage tinted by melancholy and framed by discordant chimes. Ornamental details float and fabrics descend, emerald tinted pools are peppered with droplets and our focus shifts over fields of wheat, architectural ruins and national monuments move into place, as if actors were due to orate from them, the entire scene is lit by an artificial moonlight. Theatrically staged Kunšič’s film suggests the manner in which we perform, play and remember our cultural identities and the possibility for them to become distorted and misshapen. (Elliott Burns and Pita Arreola-Burns)

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