PostHum_Condition_A_Tribute_to_Guernica

E10 "Wars, conflicts, different philosophical views and understanding of … reality are leading to the destruction of our environment. And in the middle: my children, the future generation that I view with anxiety, who will have to endure the world changing at a speed that I fear at times as either uncontrolled or overly controlled.”1 The disquieting sense of human vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of technologically-induced disaster continues to resonate in Platnic’s 2025 installation PostHum Condition: A Tribute to Guernica, on exhibit at the Open University Gallery (May-August 2025). This fourth work in the series PostHum Condition2 reflects Platnic's return to manual craft and mechanical animation, combined with real time interaction with visitors through motion sensors and surveillance cameras. The installation, comprising eight video works and five mechanical “robots” animated by servo motors, continues Platnic’s sustained investigation into twenty-first-century existential concerns. Here, he reverts to painting that is more explicitly political, invoking Picasso’s Guernica (1937), painted in 1 Personal communication, 2024. 2 Garden Muse (2023), is also part of the series PostHum Condition. 3 Find out more about Picasso’s Guernica on pablopicasso.org. the aftermath of a devastating Nazi air strike on the Basque town of the same name during the Spanish Civil War.3 In Picasso’s Guernica—which has become an icon of the horror and agony of war—we face a cataclysmic moment in which the human subject, a vulnerable creature of flesh and blood, crosses paths with technological progress in the form of highly destructive weaponry. In A Tribute to Guernica, Platnic focuses on the current moment in 2025, where the gradually thinning divide between humanity and technology seems to have finally been breached, ushering in the post-human era. Tapping into this ominous moment, Platnic uses Picasso’s painting as his point of entry into a techno-dystopian inquiry. Furthermore, Platnic's invocation of Guernica at this particular moment in Israel’s history bears a searing specificity to the October 7th massacre and its aftermath. In A Tribute to Guernica, Platnic extracts individual figures from Picasso’s composition: a dead baby; a horse neighing in agony; a small bird tilting its neck in pain; an openmouthed dead man lying on the ground; a woman raising her hands in despair

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