Joel Holmberg. You’ll Never Know If You Don’t Ask Yourself, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Holmberg’s television installation of collated newsbytes, ripped from the unstoppable stream of American televisual experience, reminds us just how even and formulaic the rhythms of media news items are. Short, awkward cuts of eyewitness accounts and interviews—ranging from the horrific (the aftermath of a local murder) to the mundane (a rescue mission for a sandwich)—turn the formulaic scripts of news stories into a disturbing meditation on the ways in which we as a technologically advanced society absorb information. Holmberg’s precise employment of sharp edits and cuts disrupts the durational flow of the projected content—testimony is cut off abruptly, leaving the viewer with a collections of words that reveal the surreal, violent, sensationalist nature of news programming.

By refusing to sustain the camera’s collected data, Holmberg forces us to recognize the underlying tempo of traditional media coverage as a current of constant information that never resolves, concludes, or coheres. The experience is both frustrating and fascinating; the eye and ear struggle to pin down the language and scenes while the experience covers over the gaps that viewers may seek to reify. Standing in front of Holmberg’s work is akin to watching a beautifully choreographed seizure in real time.

The staging of You’ll Never Know at the Atlanta Contemporary resonates with Holmberg’s extended engagement with the power and objectives of mass media and its troubling relationship with popular culture. Bits of serious and silly clips are removed from their original contexts, turning the simplicity and directness often associated with television programming into profound absurdities. The repetition of certain phrases such as “We are working to distract…” and “Now you’re in my living room…” are pulled apart by the broken explosions of interviewees exclaiming “Sandwiches!!” and “That’s a pearl!” The cacophony of footage leaves voices estranged and without direction, yelling at a public that cannot discern between serious news and mind-numbing distraction.

Joel Holmberg. You’ll Never Know If You Don’t Ask Yourself, 2015 (detail). Courtesy of the Artist and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The mood oscillates between humorous and anxious, as if the voices are begging for attention that we cannot give. Harnessing the temporal and optical characteristics of video as a medium, Holmberg constructs an environment that, while disorienting, does not negate the process of aesthetic contemplation completely. Instead, the artist finds a way to slip between the datafuge to create a tightly woven and tailored space for his own visual film language. Neither presented as a documentary nor as a film essay, Holmberg’s videos are crystalline experiments with the motility of moving images, burying themselves in the power of the camera’s eye to control our own—to seize, ground, and then ultimately destabilize images within the rectangular screen. By doing so, You’ll Never Know is less about what we are seeing than how we are seeing. The piece asks us to pinpoint the difficulty in attuning one’s eye to image a regime or aesthetic contemplation when given the choice.

In the aftermath of the horrific and surreal events in Paris this month, Holmberg’s work touches a nerve as we all look desperately into our personal technology machines, searching for information, explanations, solidarity, or a place to unload our anger and misunderstandings. Bearing witness through the pocket-sized televisual screen is part and parcel of the way Western society has come to mediate and create meaning over the past decade—the results of which have played out in contradictory ways. Are we entering a new moment of collective connectivity, where politics and possibility emanate over the beat of a Wi-Fi connection, or have we lost the older, embodied, tactile forms of connection altogether as we mindlessly “like,” “share,” and “reply” from the comfort of our desk chairs?

Holmberg’s installation forces a reckoning between what the televisual engineers organize for us and an aware form of beholding that renders these forms of information dissemination as bizarre, uncanny, and perhaps unsuitable for a newer, growing, and more demanding audience.

Joel Holmberg: You’ll Never Know If You Don’t Ask Yourself is on view at the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art through December 31, 2015.

Aleksandra Domanović. Turbo Sculpture, 2010-2013 (video still); HD video, color, sound; 20:00; edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighten, Berlin.

Domanović’s current installation, Turbo Sculpture (2010–2013) at Atlanta Contemporary, is a twenty-minute crashing of high-definition images and sounds. It examines the recent commission of monumental public sculpture that appears in major public crossways and tourist locales across the former Yugoslavia: Hollywood stars and popular musicians such as Johnny Depp and Bob Marley, fictional film characters such as Rocky Balboa and Donald Duck, and even former President George W. Bush. Garish, expensive, and extremely popular among citizens and tourists alike, these new shrines to popular commodities in American culture refuse the traditional subjects and themes of public monuments (such as national heroes, political leaders, or representations connected to the collective history of a nation) and instead grotesquely literalize the country’s swift embrace and belief in the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”[1] At once extremely jarring, ridiculous, tasteless, and thoughtful in its carefully constructed collusions of site-specific imagery and digital detritus of internet-age image culture, Turbo Sculpture is more than a subversive engagement with the implications of aesthetic failure or neoliberal kitsch. Similar to the dark humor of political philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, Domanović brushes against these tasteless sites by forcing the viewer to linger at the fault line between the ridiculous and the serious within the political landscape of former Yugoslavia.

Aleksandra Domanović. Turbo Sculpture, 2010-2013 (video still); HD video, color, sound; 20:00; edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighten, Berlin.

In the aftermath of Slobodan Milošević’s soft dictatorship of the region—its bloody civil wars, horrifying military interventions, and unresolved ethnic and racial tensions—Domanović’s work points to the broader tensions underpinning Serbian national identity through the current reign of the ersatz. Unable to reconcile history through visual representation, these public monuments to popular culture stand as insistent disavowals on behalf of the state to redirect the iconographic traditions of a nation that cannot own up to its violent, terrorizing past.

Titled in relation to “turbo-folk”—an admixture of traditional Serbian folk music, Western forms of commercial pop, Middle Eastern forms of dance music, and the rave culture that spread across the Balkans during the 1990s—Domanović appropriates the genre’s catchy, commercial lingo of deep rhythms, youthful rebellion, and grotesque scale in order to underscore the funneling of Serbian cultural life into mainstream markets. However, turbo-folk has long been regarded by left- and right-wing groups as the “soundtrack to Serbia’s wars,” both for its blatant, vulgar commerciality in Miloševic’s climate of war profiteering, as well as its distinctly un-European musical origins—a cultural symbol of the dark nationalist tensions and anxieties that circulated between Croats and Serbians during Milošević’s militant nationalist regime.[2] Drawing attention to the challenges at work in separating Serbian “turbo” culture from extreme political ideologies, Domanović places tension on the shallow gap between joyful subversion and reactionary forms of celebration.

Aleksandra Domanović. Turbo Sculpture, 2010-2013; HD video, color, sound; 20:00; edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighten (Berlin, Germany).

More importantly, Domanović’s concern with the historical legacy of national signs and symbols sheds light on an important national conversation in the United States regarding the use and abuse of icons of national “heritage” and “legacy.” As Domanović identifies, it is the elastic nature of cultural symbols that allows them to both collapse and thrive under opposing interpretations and conflicting contexts—a testament to the hopeful progressions and regressive compromises surrounding the politics of commemoration.

Aleksandra Domanović: Turbo Sculpture is on view at Atlanta Contemporary through November 7, 2015.

[1] See Frederic Jameson’s iconic text, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 1991).

[2] See Gordana Andrić’s article “Turbo-Folk Keeps Pace With New Rivals,” in the Culture section of English-language news outlet the Balkan Insight. Retrieved on the Balkan Insight webpage on October 1, 2015, at http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/turbo-folk-keeps-pace-with-new-rivals.