________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

OLSON LAMAJ

News

Works

Text

Biography

CV

Contact

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Video, HD Color, 4.03 min, 2015

How stars are born! The video piece “How stars are born” presents the ideological battles that use the same signs to transmit very different ‘spirits of time’. Rather than relying on excessive discursive framing for the artwork--a strategy from which contemporary art frequently suffers--Lamaj instead combines three dimensions of “the star” in a complex network of imagery and narration. He traces the ideological overlays of transition, a process that paints post-modern lifestyle over layers of contested heritage of an ex-communist country and society, generating a condition of latent absurdity. The monuments of a ‘glorious past’ and the partisan stories of grandfathers continue to exist alongside the advertisements of a consumerist culture and kitsch local manipulations of US and EU symbols. The narration on the science of stars stands in a position of complete absurdity vis-a-vis the ideological constructs of the meaning of ‘the star’. This is the predicament of transitional societies: there is no clarity about the past, and no viable future, and thus they always remain within the thick line of confusion.