Discomfort

«We wanted to print out these slides over «Flat» chairs by designer Filip Gordon Frank. For some reason that didn’t happen and the slides have been in a drawer for the past ten years or so. It’s a shame they go to waste. The photographer was Domagoj Kunić. The models are unknown. Domagoj says he doesn’t remember who’s ass he had photographed.

Everyone who has ever seen these slides felt discomfort. We also felt discomfort. The photographer felt discomfort while taking the photos. We think Filip Gordon Frank also felt discomfort when we suggested to print the slides over his chairs. This is probably the reason they stayed in a drawer for so long.

This is all too much discomfort because of completely ordinary human body, despite of everything that has happened in society and the arts for the past hundred years or so. Even though we are surrounded by pornography and commercially used nudity, it’s enough to slightly change the angle of the camera and again – discomfort. One should dive into this feeling of mismatch and understand the mechanisms that cause it. Those are the same mechanisms that cause a bunch of other unconscious reactions to social circumstances.

In any case we believe this poster provides the observer with two possibilities: the pleasure of seeing beautiful human bodies from a less usual perspective, or discomfort – a feeling that’s worth addressing in the context of solving everyday social conflicts. Unfortunately, most of the observers who have seen this poster by now fall into the other group. So it’s really a shame this slides go to waste.”

The poster Discomfort was created as part of the project Plakatiranje (Posterising) organized by the web page Vizkultura.hr. Each Thursday Vizkultura.hr presents one poster dealing with social and cultural issues, made for them especially by either established or up-and-coming visual artists and designers and there have been over 80 of them so far. Besides the web page itself, the posters are being placed in a public space, the street window of Kino Europa in Zagreb.

Bruketa&Žinić OM / Davor Bruketa, Nikola Žinić (Creative and Art Directors), Radovan Radičević (DTP)

Domagoj Kunić (Photographer)

Vizukultura.hr (Photo of the exhibited poster)