Nataša Prosenc Stearns: Hotel Diary

Nataša Prosenc Stearns: Hotel Diary

Lapidarium, 14. 9.-4. 11. 2018

Nataša Prosenc Stearns’s Hotel Diary is a series of photomontage prints and video sound spatial installations, the variations of which were especially created and adjusted to the Lapidarium. For the setting she chose an abandoned hotel with a bar in the business centre of Los Angeles. She used a static camera to film the Hotel Diary, for it makes the footage similar to that of surveillance cameras. Such footage gives the impression of indifference or perhaps neutrality. It is a voyeuristic view of events that are taking place in hotel rooms, hallways and staircases. The Hotel Diary has the recognisable artist’s credo of the human figure placed or interwoven with elements of nature. The artist’s specific editing technique of layering the various shot sequences transforms and abstracts the works. Careful and well thought settings of these videos in to the peculiar Lapudarium rooms, encourages viewer’s sensory or emotional response. The comprehensive artwork is a horizontal interlacement of different stories and their possible associations. By entering and moving around the space, the visitors co-create the dramaturgy of the place with their conscious and subconscious cognitive and sensory processes. By coming in the former monastery pantries, one enters the temporary rooms of the Hotel Diary, a work that can be merged into a film or experienced as independent video-sound installations.

Curator: Meta Kordiš

Photo: Maruša Lapuh, GBJ archive