Artist: Mihael Giba

Mihael Giba is a Croatian intermedia artist, who is presenting the first solo exhibition of his work in Slovenia. His art focuses on the area of data visualization, and he has developed special computer software that serves as the basis for his installations. The common element in Giba’s projects is their mapping of both individual and global social phenomena.

The exhibition TRUST ME I TRUST YOU presents an installation of this same name, which is composed of a series of five artist books, in which legal documents and international agreements signed by the Croatian government have been translated by Giba in his own visual language in an ironic attempt to become a useful transmitter between viewers and the language of bureaucracy. Besides the books, the exhibition is rounded out by a projection that categorizes data from a session of parliament into such groupings as sports, culture, economics, etc., and presents them as images of a digital landscape.

The artist’s chosen mode of mapping derives from his desire to create a dialogue between the state and its citizens that is as direct as possible. Through the visualization of data, he moves from the concrete to the abstract only to return again to the concrete. This movement has been described by Lev Manovich as the real challenge of data art, which, as he states in Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime (2002), is “not about how to map some abstract and impersonal data into something meaningful and beautiful”, but rather “how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society”.

Curator: Yasmín Martín Vodopivec
P74 Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

9 March 2012 – 28 March 2012

Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist and Dejan Habicht. P74 Archive.