Rege Foka (°1996, Amsterdam, Netherlands) creates mixed media artworks, photos and conceptual artworks. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, Foka absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.
His mixed media artworks are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, he uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. The work incorporates time as well as space – a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit.
His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.
His works bear strong political references. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting.
His works are based on inspiring situations: visions that reflect a sensation of indisputability and serene contemplation, combined with subtle details of odd or eccentric, humoristic elements. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognised, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.
His works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, he tries to create works in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.
His works doesn’t reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
His works are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, he often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.
His works are given improper functions: significations are inversed and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their original meaning, by which the system in which they normally function is exposed. Initially unambiguous meanings are shattered and disseminate endlessly. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, he creates intense personal moments masterfully created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round in circles.
His works are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By applying abstraction, his works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
His works are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. By putting the viewer on the wrong track, he often creates several practically identical works, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, ‘mistakes’ are repeated.
His works often refers to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, he wants the viewer to become part of the art as a kind of added component. Art is entertainment: to be able to touch the work, as well as to interact with the work is important.
His collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. Rege Foka currently lives and works in Belgrade.
Acevedo Hülsbusch Juana Joceline
Bidari Basavaraj Shrishail Bidari
Bonton Bonton Bontongone Nelly
Brasser Valentine Marie Caroline
De Torres Y Sandoval Ramón Argila
González Rojas Adriana Marcela
Hernández Hernández Alejandro José
Himmelsbach De Vries Domenique
International Resource Center For Art Cairo
Junior Dope Lord Illuminati Lives
Madam Cosmic Entrepreneur Mastermind
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Patil (inspirational Speaker) Rakxit
Patricia Smyka Fathermoonandme
Payanene Velasquez Junior Haminton
Pedraza Eodriguez Emma Angelica
Plasencia Magdaleno Juan Moisés
Rodríguez Briseño Gustavo Daniel
Salas Dominguez Mayra Alejandra
Sigurdardottir Johanna Kristbjorg
Vanto Dumisani Vanto Dumfiasco
Vishva Naedurana Pathirannehelage