Erik Sikora
Predpovede a popovede

Erik Sikora (*1986) applies undemanding, non-prefabricated or widespread DIY procedures in his work. In the spirit of contemporary clip culture he works mainly with video, which he often composes with epic sound poetics. His videos are records of live events bordering on nonsense and poetic symbolism. He is interested in banality and its imaginative potential, abbreviation, the unbridled concept of life. The tool of his exploration is creativity as spontaneous situational activity which liberates the imagination from entrenched habits and rules, enables authentic being, and may potentially fire off the proverbial social bomb. From the point of view of the counter-culture his approach may be taken even as political.

The video works by Erik Sikora are organically interlinked by the genre of reportage, instructional film and videoessay. The artist presents himself in them as an inventive entrepreneur, innovator or educator. He guides us through the phases of identifying a “problem”, its analysis to the proposed solution. A paradigmatic role was played in his work by the set of videos called Tvoridlo (2011). Sikora characterizes Tvoridlo as an apparatus-tool-person and exposes it to various conditions and situations, through which he opens himself up to creative activity and spontaneous action. Tvoridlo then seems to stand in the background of his further work. Although he aims to resolve more concrete themes, so that we might start to consider him an engaged artist, he performs the same investigation all the time: what creativity is and which forms it attains, when it is exposed to impulses from the real world.

Erik Sikora lives in Košice in Slovakia. In 2014 he was the finalist of the Oskar Čepán Award, a Slovak analogy to the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for artists up to 35 years old.