Tomaž Furlan (1978) deals specifically with the uncompromising disclosure of the pathological conditions of modern and contemporary society and its behaviour. Consequently, all of these bizarre objects and machines of his are also nonsensical and self-serving. He creates these machines in the outpouring of experiences and findings from observing our society, and uses them to caricature society itself.

In their function and composition, Furlan’s machines are driven to the extreme possible, absurd limits. And with this, the artist focuses on the elements that define this key set of nonsense: a monotonous and infinitely-many repetition of one and the same order of different tasks and movements, where it is impossible to perceive any final logical goal.

Tomaž Furlan has participated in numerous exhibitions in Slovenia and internationaly, among others: at 3,14 Gallery, Bergen, Norway (2008); Parkingallery in collaroboration with Azad Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2009); Washington USA (2010); Manifesta 9, Genk, Belgium (2012); U3 - 7th Triennial for Slovenian Contemporary Art, MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2013), MSUM (2014), Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, Rochechouart, France (2015), FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France (2017).
Tomaž Furlan is recipient of the »OHO Award 2012«, dedicated to young, progressive visual artist in Slovenia.

Manifesta 9, Genk Belgium (WEAR Series)
»Work in so-called ‘post-Fordist’ societies is usually conceived both as time-flexible and skill-flexible, if not an idiosyncratic mix of entertainment, team-based self-organization and ‘creative’ lifestyles. Were we to believe the rhetoric of the new workplace, the early mass concentration of workers inside the noise and danger of the industrial factory is on its way to being replaced by wired networks of independent remote workers, who create and exchange with their colleagues in a dynamic, self-made social interface. Deliberately mimicking contemporary social and productive routines with sculpture devices whose functioning and aesthetics hark back to makeshift industrial hardware, Tomaž Furlan’s Wear series pokes fun at the assumption that exhausting, repetitive and alienating labor is a thing of the past. His ‘machines’ – which fall somewhere between fitness machines, makeshift tools and torture devices – are tailored to satirize the dry and dumbfounding routines of the white collar worker from dawn to sunset, in a hilarious rendition of the contemporary disciplines of the body. The deadpan videos that accompany them recall late-night TV infomercials, pretending to demonstrate the qualities of Furlan’s products. “Lavorare stanca” (work’s tiring), wrote the poet Cesare Pavese. Furlan evokes the critiques of industrialism’s techniques of bodily domination immortalized in the work of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, in (to quote the artist) an “attempt to struggle banality with stupidity.”
Cuauhtémoc Medina, curator

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