Frank Theys

Zelfportret, video installation

Nagrada Bogdanka Poznanović

A simple, basic, yet strong idea translated very well in this personal monitor work. Headlessly sitting in front of his computer monitor and his decapitated body walking back and forth from his desk to the window of his working space, Frank Theys confronts us with the role and position of the personal computer in our daily lives taking over our daily thinking process. With the heart still pumping blood in an attempt to nourish the brain, the blood comes squirting out of his body onto the monitor screen and the appartment window, blocking his view for what has become his reality. Presented here in Novi Sad, the work gets another connotation and meaning added onto Theys’s original intentions. Thinking of the Milosevic time here in Serbia-Montenegro, people were ‘headlessly’ believing everything that state television was letting them believe, letting the television take over their head and individual thinking, or as some Serbian festival visitors put it: ‘as if the streets were filled with people walking with television monitors on their body, instead of heads that are able to think – and act – for themselves’. (Jan Schuijren on behalf of Jury)