Alemka Đivoje / VIEW WITH A LAG

alemka djivoje_view with a lag_salon galic_april 2017

Besides her presence, the author’s focus lies on her own physical and mental transformations that are subsequently retold and commented on in the exhibition space. In this respect it is important to stress that the linear flow of her personal story is collapsed and that slices of time are mixed and contrasted between one another. The consequence of such procedure is a subtle tension, emanated by the „fragments of the story”, which takes place at aesthetic and semantic planes. One should not regard these fragments individually but approach the exhibition as a full storytelling composition comprising interpenetrating elements. The story has actually been around for a while, starting with Reflection, series of works and exhibitions held by the author at this exact location (Salon Galić), which problematize mirrors and symmetry, real and fictional, material space and space of reflection, and physical and semantic field. This line of discourse is present on this occasion as well, through recycling pre-existing visual units and patterns, but predominantly through building new contents and constructing unfamiliar chapters.

Although the author and her presence remain the main subject of the story, the exhibition induces time as important agent in the space of tension. Dislocated from the linear section view, it is placed within the practice of postmodern perspectives based on labile, cross-foundations. It seems the collapse of time and “unexpected” confrontations are present in all segments of the exhibition. From poetically imbued and aesthetically seducible scenes depicting windmills, which suggest anthropomorphic measure of rhythmic circulation and comprehension of time, as well as attempt to destabilise it, to the images showing the author’s biological age with a “lag”. The author seems to be staging Foucault’s heterotopies, located far away from organised and dominantly visible spatial and temporal configurations. These images are embedded into the author’s identity, but, all of the sudden, they become parallel, simultaneously visible. Composed together, they construct representations of CURIOUSNESS.

Particularly interesting fragments of the story are the documentary photographs selected by the artist from her family photo album. All of them show the places in which the author grew up and matured. The sites are authentic, as well as the analogue photographs, however, digital interventions are fictional. The author upsets the system of identification by intervening into the physiognomy of her mother’s face, attributing it some of her own features. The description of thus amalgamated space states: in her own arms she sits by herself. These interventions are extremely brimming and penetrate into the cyclic change of life, creating an uncomfortable sound, a kind of MUTENESS.

Although this is a deeply intimate story, its outline, staged and constructed by the author, is common and tells about humane individuals and their complex presence. It is a story about existence and being exposed that turns observers towards the field of introspection, leading them to analyse their inner selves. The author evokes memories of growing up in her birthplace Lastovo and extracts specific places and her own connection to their past. She analyses family memories, picks some of the photographs and comments on them using interventions. They are supplemented by the images displaying present state of these places. However, without people in these photographs, it looks as if they are losing their historical consciousness and become ahistorical, because they question reflective relations between space and communication, and not exact historical relicts and documentarist reconstructions. A procedure resembling autopsy of one’s identity, it was started by the author around ten years ago and will continue in regular rhythm throughout her walk of life.

Dalibor Prančević