Martina Bastarda: TV auction

Author: Martina Bastarda
Title: TV auction
Year of creation: 2003
Owner: Martina Bastarda
Work info: video, screening version VCD
Duration: 59’44’’

Description of work:
Performance-auction of artworks broadcasted live on TV Pika, Ljubljana, April 8, 2004:
“I was the host of an hour-long artworks auction broadcasted live on TV Pika where I was selling self-portraits (of face, breasts and behind) made in Byzantine icon style. I borrowed the auction form from gallery owner Mario Varga who does regular auctions of paintings from his gallery on the same TV station.”

Martina Bastarda (1976)
The majority of her production features the quest and research of alternative spaces in which art is still made possible. This feature determines the content and usage of media for carrying out projects in the scope of author video, performance, photography, installation and billboards.

From 1997 to 2003 she studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In April 2003 she graduated in the class of Prof. Lujo Vodopivec and Prof. Lev Kreft. From 2000 to 2001 she was specialising at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece. In 2003 she staged the performance TV auction on TV Pika. Her works have been presented among other in Modern Gallery Ljubljana (Territories, Identities, Networks. Slovenian Art 1995-2005, 2005), in Gallery Equrna in Ljubljana (Will That Do?, 2004) and at the Venice Biennale (Dreams and Conflicts, the Viewer’s Dictatorship: Recycling the Future; Vivere Venezia 2; student site specific project, 2003).

Lately she is dedicated to researching contemporary arts in connection to public media. She is primarily interested in television and its ether as, on the one hand, potential space and possible medium for expressing contemporary visual art and, on the other hand, as a space that provides contemporary visual art with media presence. Her interest in this subject arises mainly out of her interest in a wider social space. What are the features of contemporary society?; How does it function, how does it communicate and subsequently what kind of art is in fact relevant, needed, suitable or necessary in the present social circumstances.