NIKOLA TAMINDZIC at Dumbo Studio / Brooklyn

Nikola Tamindzic / Assume Form 

April 22-23, 2023

Dumbo Open Studios

68 Jay Street, 7th floor, studio #717 Brooklyn, New York

















ASSUME FORM is composed of images sourced from adult videos shared among users of peer-to-peer networks. Due to nature of distribution and transfer protocols, the files are shredded into millions of slices among thousands of users, and then reassembled for viewing, which makes them prone to chaotic dysfunction while in this incomplete state. The artist allows this decomposition to unfold naturally, even organically, patiently waits for the unpredictable, unrepeatable shifts to occur (mirroring Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”), then captures the resulting images, and presents them unaltered and unadorned. No AI was used in the process.

ASSUME FORM investigates the forces that form the body — but also unmake it — the forces that emanate from inside living bodies, and the interaction of forces that make meat and tissue more than themselves. Bodies emerge from other bodies and spill out from themselves, followed by a river of limbs and orifices — a mouth, a leg, a mirror, a shadow — bodies escape through their own mouths, whipped by forces that are acutely felt but can’t be known, forces that are unseen but capable of being visualized, somehow, by bypassing the narrative and the representational, and focusing on the effects these forces have on bodies.

These images are representations of unpredictability and restless, impatient forces (if one had to be named, then desire, Breton’s “sole motivating principle of the world”, would be key among them), rather than any narrational or constructed realism; they are irrational and anarchic, reflecting conflict of rationality and irrationality in modern life, switching from figuration to abstraction and back again, given form by ambitions and failures of contemporary technology, and at the same time in dialogue with older practices, such as painting, tapestry and mosaic, while in this whole back & forth being firmly rooted in primal sexual unconscious.