Related items: Interview by the curator with Nebudu group about their work “Tabula rasa”

Critique of Pure Image - Between Fake and Quotation

The Exhibition

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Nebudu group (Borjana Ventzislavova, Mladen Penev, Miroslav Ničić)

Tabula rasa

Digital print/billboard installed in the central city space at the corner “6-i septemvri”/main street, 2004.

Nebudu group is not a group. It derives from an accident and consists of Borjana Ventzislavova, Miroslav Nicic and Mladen Penev. They operate in the field of media art and graphic design, from participative social projects to work in public space. Nebudu group is currently based in Vienna.

The original tabula rasa is a theory that the (human) mind is at birth a “blank slate” without data or rules for processing it, and that data is added and rules for processing it formed solely by our sensory experiences. Tabula rasa was first advocated by John Locke, and is central to empiricism. It is also featured in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. As understood by Locke, tabula rasa emphasized the individual’s freedom to author his own soul. According to the modern definition of tabula rasa, the idea that the individual can be changed remains, but the power to effect that change is now ascribed to society, not the self. Under this view, one can shape the individual with few, if any, restrictions by changing the individual’s environment, and thus sensory experiences. As the Lockean idea of “natural rights” no longer has any meaning under such a view (because “natural” now means whatever society chooses to define), all such schemes end up moving towards one form or another of totalitarianism.