Sunčica Ostoić
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, / Conference April 20 / Curator: Zane Cerpina
Bodies in Intensity
The lecture presents a conceptual framework of ‘intensity’ and its properties in connection to bodies in interaction with the extreme, excessive, radical, and extravagant (EERE) contemporary visual art practices at the intersection of the body and technology. EERE artistic practices operate on the edge of norms, experimenting with art forms, themes, and life forms – from biological to technological entities – in an innovative and unsettling manner, stimulating various new profound experiences. Affective intensity is a sensory experience without content that possesses physical force and does not follow linguistic protocols and structures. It can become linguistically articulated when it enters the realm of semantic recognition, namely intellectual definition or feeling. However, until it is defined in emotion or language, it is a quality of pure physical force that stimulates, directs, and sustains experience. Intensities are diverse complex singularities that create unique affective situations. As such, they provoke biological-bodily actions that disrupt discursive abstraction and metadiscourse in the name of the vitality of life’s processes. Visceral intensity is the fundamental affective form of embodied experience in EERE art. It is a drastic and dramatic impulse-charge that hits bodies in space and time, causing tension. Intensity is analogous, cranky, and has ecstatic qualities that oscillate forcefully, producing short, bombastic, and tense embodied effects. Bodily-shocking, yet undefined and unstable, the intensity of EERE artistic practices exists only as activity. Intensities in EERE artistic practices are enhanced and prolonged, seizing and saturating bodies. They induce a pervasive dramatic state of bodily activation of the audience experiencing unclear, linguistically undefined sensations – provoking corporeality. The corporeality activated in relation to the artwork is filled with vitality. The body, in visceral intensity, is shaken by a multitude of simultaneous possibilities – possible sensory experiences, possible feelings, and possible emotions. Therefore, intensities act by stretching bodies in options, only some of which are realized. EERE artworks thus facilitate the “pushing” of bodies into intensity from experiencing vitality to thought and emotion.
Sunčica Ostoić (HR) is an art historian and art theorist from Zagreb, Croatia. Her area of interest lies in the practice and theory of visual arts intersecting with science, technology, and the body in the 20th and 21st centuries. She graduated in art history and philosophy from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and holds a PhD in Art and Media Sciences from the Faculty of Media and Communications, University of Singidunum in Belgrade. Her doctoral dissertation explored “Modalities of Extreme, Excessive, Radical, and Extravagant Contemporary Visual Art Practices,” under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Miodrag Šuvaković. As a co-founder and long-time director of the Zagreb-based association KONTEJNER | Bureau of contemporary art praxis, Ostoić has worked for twenty-five years as an independent curator, organizer of artistic events, and researcher. She is the author of internationally recognized festivals of contemporary art such as Touch Me (since 2002), Device_art (since 2004), and Extravagant Bodies (since 2007). Additionally, she has authored numerous professional and scientific articles, art exhibition forewords, edited exhibition and festival catalogs, and interdisciplinary readers, as well as lectured at conferences. Since 2016, she has been an external lecturer and expert collaborator at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb.
Header graphics: Portrait photo, courtesy of Sunčica Ostoić.