Marija Avramović, Célia Gondol and Paul Lahana, Pauline Lavogez, Rachel Marks, Lise Stoufflet
Curator: Svetlana Monuta

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May 12th – 26th

Belgrade, 12th May 2017

Cher(e)s ami(e)s,

I would like to write you about an exhibition I have been thinking of for a long time now. I would compare it to the process of writing in the same manner that Marguerite Duras contemplated it, and that is organically connecting it to the state of solitude – the solitude of the author, the solitude of the written and the feeling of fear in front of a vast void and the strong desire to confront it. Hence, the exhibition as a process of writing in space, writing into the space with gesture, movement, material and rhythm.

This space, at first glance neutral and bearing no meaning, infinitely free and the same time unpredictable, would transform into a space of dialogue and sharing, an encounter of the individual, personal and intimate with the other, the social and outward.

The exhibition would develop through several chapters: la mer, le déplacement, la rencontre… Where the experience of continual movement would be taken as a starting point. The movement would go inside and outside the very format of the exhibition and would be rhythmically formatted by the locality of the works, their mutual relationship and interactions. In the physical experience of the fluidity of water and the sea, Pauline Lavogez investigates the vast, borderless territories of the possible as opposed to the solitude and fragility of the individual floating in them. Although at first glance and in their structure classical and figurative, the compositions of Lise Stoufflet veer from their own limiting frame, personal and oniric world, into a space outside of the painting, characterized by permeable borders between fiction and reality. Rachel Marks maps the exhibition space with the body, gesture and sound, thus imprinting her own intimate experience of exploration and travelling into it. The apparent freedom with which Marija Avramović selects her materials and interlaces them creates hybrid textures of monumental and ephemeral maps and signals. The joint work of Celia Gondol and Paul Lahana conceived specifically for this exhibition could be seen as a visual expression of the unexpected, but above all, a desired encounter which may take place.

What would this exhibition speak about? And does an exhibition ‘speak’, tell a story, or could it maybe be seen as a collective experience which, like an organism, develops and evolves through the relations and interactions of the artists, the curator and the audience in a particular space and time? Is the exhibition a product of the individual or the collective, as Lautréamont, the Surrealists and Branko Miljković hoped for, concerting that poetry will be written by everyone? This exhibition would search for a different type of writing gesture, open and engaged, as an expression of the need to continuously question the politics of friendship.

Svetlana Montua

Translation: Isidora Krstić
Photo: N. Ivanović