My practice is predominantly location driven. Through research, investigation and exploration, I develop concepts, which I execute choosing a particular medium or discipline most suitable to tell a story and its meanings. I collect stories. They form an important aspect of my understanding of what life is about. By listening to people and their experiences and by observing how they survive, what kind of dreams they had, and how they pursue those dreams or not. The more I am trying to understand a specific situation of a group of people, the more I try to learn about culture and history, which provides me with insights in today’s political landscapes. The works I try to make are attempts to provide an antidote on constructed media images of specific situations. As an example the effects of a policy by a national government or the European Union and its influence on the general opinion. For instance the way how people think about refugees coming into Europe contrasted with how those refugees are struggling to make homes and regain their lives and their dignity again. Thereby telling a story of perseverance and dreams, and by doing that connecting situations which could happen to everybody, personalizing it. Questions like; “what does it means to be uprooted from a home?”, “what exactly means this concept of ‘home’, which is a recurrent personal question to me after several relocations to different countries.”
By researching all these aspects of the societies as I encountered them, I started to understand the role of technology and in particular the paradoxical dichotomy between digital art and physical objects and social and cultural displacements. Currently I explore the relationship humanity has with objects through the prism of Object Oriented Ontology in relation to how we derive a feeling of belonging, status and home. This through identifying which consumable objects increasingly become more virtual and latent, not unlike ideas instead of material matter. I endeavor to link this with concepts of sustainability and waste economy, but also what kind of avenue a world in turmoil can expect to take. How global migration caused by displacement of large groups of people can be linked with hegemonic politics and economics and how the political landscape can be changed through these life altering events for so many people. Is there still place to dream, in a world where the prospects are increasingly becoming bleak. I intent to keep on searching for those dreams and to let my work be inspired by them.
Tony Maslic, 2017