Janis Lejins

Janis Lejins is an innovative Australian artist, researcher, critic and curator. 

His practice frequently inculcates cutting edge technology and prevailing socio-cultural vectors to holistically interrogate the multilateral machinations of our public sphere. Overwhelmingly the work and research use self-conscious methodologies that investigate the configuration of our socio-political narratives in a way which also functions to productively problematise, unravel and re-reroute the construction of contemporary ontologies. 

The innately interdisciplinary way Janis' practice promiscuously deals with both challenging, manifold, cultural moves and deeper philosophical preoccupations, exemplifies how contemporary artistic practices and research methodologies - irrespective of form - might help us reroute the currently prevailing isolationist agendas and instead better grasp, and instantiate, the complex, inescapably quantum, models of togetherness required to confront the seismic collective issues, like climate change, confronting our society today

At the RCA a key research pathway was the investigation the role technology plays in the pre-configuration and quantisation, of our socio-political narratives. Lejins’ exhibited Master's project, Kingdoms For A Rose, addressed our latest 'culture war'. Practically the innovative computational installation fused a trove of videos (which were curated by micro-targeting algorithms active on YouTube) with an immersive surround soundscape which was driven in real-time by the hyperactivity of the foreign exchange market. This audiovisual amalgam of competing economies of inter-subjectivity was installed within a hyperbolic black monolith which was made entirely by a surfeit of faux-roses and faux-marble sourced from Amazon Prime. The resulting installation was a gesamtkunstwerk for the 21st century which deftly toed the line between absurdity an atrocity. Ultimately the work existed as a pertinent material indictment of our increasingly egocentric and hyper-aestheticised political discourse and tacit reminder of the innately plural and entangled fact of our reality.