Igor Štromajer’s exhibition focuses on the project Expunction. Between 11 May and 16 June 2011, Štromajer, one of the pioneers of net art in Slovenia and worldwide, carried out a ritual expunction of his classic net projects, which he created between 1996 and 2007. Every day during that period, he deleted one net art project; he removed it permanently from his server, so that the projects are now no longer available on the web server of Intima Virtual Base. He completely deleted 37 net art projects, totalling 3288 files or 101 MB.

The project Expunction raises questions about temporality, duration and availability of net art projects (the so-called “net art”), which change over time and slowly, but persistently lose their utility and, accordingly, their content. Štromajer’s principal guide in this project was the idea that one who creates, programs and constructs art can also deprogram, deconstruct, delete it. This is not an aggressive or destructive act, but rather an instance of taking into account natural rhythm: birth, life, death, which repeat themselves cyclically and oscillate in natural amplitudes. Štromajer has deleted history, including his own personal, intimate history, for he believes that memory is here to deceive, to betray us, and not to show and describe the past for us. A deceitful memory is not hard to delete, for it does not offer a realistic image of the past of which it speaks; it is always just a fraudulent, fabricated image. Hence, once they are published, the deleted art works or their remaining fragments – which can no longer be deleted due to the dispersal and the fragmentation of the world wide web – tell us much more about their originals (the original art works) than the originals themselves.

Igor Štromajer (Intima Virtual Base)is a web artist, intimate mobile communicator and virtual performer, who has participated in various exhibitions and festivals at home and abroad. The opus of Intima Virtual Base comprises more than fifty projects, which have been exhibited at more than a hundred different exhibitions in 45 countries. Štromajer received several awards for his work (in Moscow, Hamburg, Dresden, Belfort, Madrid) and his projects have been purchased to be included in permanent collections at leading art institutions (such as the Centre national d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou – Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Computerfinearts Gallery – Net and Media Art Collection in New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Slovene Museum of Contemporary Arts in Ljubljana, and the Maribor Art Gallery in Maribor). As artist-in-residence, he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes in Europe, USA and Canada.