Nina Bešlić / Cross dissolve II - Blendings

Cross dissolve II – Blendings

In the event of her thirteenth solo exhibition, Nina Iris Bešlić presents to us two works; previously exhibited Cross Dissolve – Transparent Spaces II, and Cross Dissolve II – Blendings, devised specifically for Salon Galić. It is a complex artistic concept deserving of a deeper analysis, however, for the needs of the catalogue I will merely outline some of the aspects the author deals with, as well as the ways they overlap with contemporary society.

1. View

According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the moment subject discovers he/she can be regarded as an object, they enter state of anxiety because they lose a certain degree of autonomy. This is closely connected to his mirror stage theory, when a child, standing in front of the mirror, realises he/she possesses external appearance.

While there are a number of synonyms for the word view in English language (glance, sight, gaze…), in Croatian a single word (pogled) is used for all of these nuances. Therefore, its meaning can be interpreted in many ways: as directedness of one’s eyes towards someone or something;  eyes reflecting a spiritual state; means of evaluation; place whence one observes; things revealed to the eye, a scene; way of looking at something, opinion, understanding, attitude, belief.

In the context of visual culture, the most frequent English equivalent to ‘pogled’ is ‘gaze’. This is a concept primarily related to Michel Foucalt and Lacan, applied to the film theory by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay. According to her, there are three types of perspective in cinematography: camera perspective, audience perspective and protagonist perspective… Their complex interaction is specific for film. Similar type of interaction occurs within Nina’s boxes.

Today we live in a society of control and surveillance cameras where public space is becoming increasingly rare phenomenon. Consequently, the problematic of observation and perspective assumes completely different meanings. Absurdly, every viewpoint is ideological, except for the one coming from surveillance cameras that clinically and objectively take note of everything happening in their field of vision.

1. Public/private

Jurgen Habernas’s ‘public sphere’ model is founded on the idea that there are two separate spheres, public and private, based on traditional conceptions of gender and race, therefore on exclusion. In reality, there are many public spheres that overlap and exist simultaneously: working class, religious, feminist, nationalist public spheres…

Today, more than ever before, the ideas of public and private are almost inseparable due to politics of late capitalism, which purposely erases boundaries in order to pursue its own interests, turning private persons into consumers and political followers. As public space disappears, the idea of privacy fades out as well in the time of electronic, virtual reality.

• Photography

Photography employed by the artist, especially photographs of her friends and family members, is the closest thing to ‘snapshooting’; photography used by masses as means of documenting private ritual moments, deeply interwoven into most intimate social relations – family, leisure time, private memories, personal vanity (Don Slater). It is a consumerist and fetishist type of photography so it is not strange that central motifs are reserved for family and leisure time, frequent targets of consumer capitalism. This kind of life and photography that documents it is conventional, passive and harmless.

It seems Nina uses complex optic play in an effort to make such idea deeper and multi-layered, and avoid traps put before us by surrounding images/simulacra. Opposite to their hyperrealism (depicting reality more realistically than it is), Nina creates hallucinatory, shapeless, fluid scenes that move away from the sober perception of reality. In contrast to simulacrum, Nina’s work is warm and inclusive.

Anita Kojundžić-Smolčić