Darko Škrobonja / Sade sati

Darko Škrobonja’s recent artistic production is based on documenting his immediate environment, i.e. respective phenomena and their contextualisation via technological manipulation and organisation into several independent, theme-based archives. Combination of the latter methods resulted in creation of rounded artistic units that are not just documents of a specific time, space or phenomenon but, due to the author’s artistic sensibility, they provoke speculation about metaphysical and other semantic aspects of featured places and processes.

With regard to the multimedia exhibition Sade Sati, the aforementioned units are organised as spatial modules that evoke various transformations and processes occurring within specific meteorological seasons, not necessarily following their natural order. Thus, just as we entered the gallery space, we say goodbye to summer in the video work showing birds which, before leaving for warmer climes, chew on cypress fruits and prepare for the flight southwards. Slowed down, melancholic frames in Birds (2017) suggest the inertia of the upcoming autumn, when the days are shorter, and the weather becomes chiller; toned down atmosphere and change in the speed of the original footage draws attention to the essential spatial-temporal component of motion, which is actually a background trigger of the whole exhibition experience. The feeling of change and temporality is further accentuated through the use of black and white tonality present also in video projection, digital photo prints and photographs conveying a sense of nostalgia and historicity of captured scenes and compositions.

In the parts of the exhibition where this is not evident at first, what contributes to the general feeling of fluidity is the narrative strength of previously exhibited Lapis Interior (2015), displaying a rock, an indestructible barrier penetrating from one side into the interior of former fish processing facility. The rock was originally used to improve the factory’s ventilation, however, through the author’s perspective it potentially reveals much more about coastal people and their mentality. Alongside the work there are digital photo prints involving interplay of tiny motifs disappearing or reappearing as we move closer or away from them. Similar dynamism can be recognised at the second end of the temperature spectre, in form of “summer” photographs based equally on individual visual strength and playful relationship between chosen motifs, from architecture, vegetation to random objects, shot all the way from Ogorje to Marocco. Thence the motif of goats on trees, a quite captivating scene even without the author’s editing of the photo. Video projection Medusas (2017) shows intriguing movements of the namesake animals, with the audio background of spring wind containing symbolic and allegoric potential that comes from the phenomenon of wind being the carrier of changes and important factor in spreading life.

At the end we return to the beginning, more precisely, to the exhibition title (Sade Sati), which denotes a seven and a half year period in which individuals constantly experience various tests and changes. It does not necessarily need to end with a negative outcome because many things depend on previous and present efforts of men affected by it. Regardless of whether the choice of the exhibition title as another semantic layer was influenced by his personal or professional experience, one would not make a mistake in saying that Darko Škrobonja’s Sade Sati represents a current sum of his artistic sensibility, technical capability and conceptual/directorial maturity realised through parallel narration.

Božo Kesić