Hunger

Goran Bertok confronts us with those aspects of physicality—with manifestations and presentations of illness, death, ugliness, etc.—which the average contemporary user of social networks rejects. At the same time, we are faced on a personal, intimate level, with the perishability of our own bodies, which are, after their physical death, doomed to become a dead piece of meat.
This is reminiscent of the medieval images of the triumph of death that were intended to make it easier for people to cope with the inevitable and to feel some kind of reassurance in realising their ultimate equality in the face of Death. When confronting the works of Goran Bertok today, they may fill us with disgust and horror, but they are also telling us: memento mori...
Bertok deals with the transience of the human body also in his latest series of works, this time, however, from a slightly different perspective. He introduces us to a tortured and exhausted, weary body, bearing the consequences of extreme physical and psychological experience of giving up food.
Bertok does not question the personal, psychological, or social motives and circumstances that brought the subject of his depiction into such a state. The artist compares the experience of anorexia with other borderline experiences, be it the so-called SM practices or the survival in the extreme conditions of concentration camps, which he has dealt with in his former projects and photographic series.
In recent decades, we have been able to monitor the increasing trend of eating disorders, and simultaneously the trend of a changing beauty ideal. In the social construction of a beautiful body, the imperatives of slenderness, healthy diet, sporty appearance, etc. began to prevail.
In 2007, the notorious Benetton photographer Oliviero Toscani shoot for the Nolita fashion campaign the completely emaciated model Isabelle Caro, who died a year later as a consequence of weight loss.
Anorexia has in a way become a metaphor for the ambivalence of the modern world, where at the same time there is abundance and scarcity, as well as a metaphor for a world in which the ugly can suddenly become beautiful and vice versa.
Many depictions of tortured and suffering bodies are known in the history of art, notably in the Christian iconography of Christ and of male and female saints. The Neoplatonic conception of the world in early Christianity as the embodiment of primordial Beauty was represented by the idealised image of paradise, the good shepherd, and the saints. (By the way, today [classic and social] media creates a similarly ideal picture of the modern consumer society.)

Hunger

Dejan Sluga: How Beautiful is Ugly

Bertok deals with the transience of the human body also in his latest series of works, this time, however, from a slightly different perspective. He introduces us to a tortured and exhausted, weary body, bearing the consequences of extreme physical and psychological experience of giving up food. Again, Bertok does not question the personal, psychological, or social motives and circumstances that brought the subject of his depiction into such a state. The artist compares the experience of anorexia with other borderline experiences, be it the so-called SM practices or the survival in the extreme conditions of concentration camps, which he has dealt with in his former projects and photographic series. Thus, the purpose of the project is not to "photodocument" the phenomenon of a disorder or disease, but rather to question the very nature of our physicality, our relationship to the emaciated body and the pain that we presuppose or feel when looking at the proximity of death.

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