Sava Knežević
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July 28th – August 11th
The choice of the topic for the exhibition “Wherever the Wind Blows” is symbolically as well as existentially linked to life in an urban environment and in the contemporary age, specifically alluding to its possible modification. The object that is being repeated in the works, and whose presence in the urban environment inevitably accumulates the remnants of intensive life of urban spaces recording all the diversity of parallel life flows of these spaces and questioning the functions of the public utility services and educational system, creates an opportunity for an artistic exploration that is confronted with concepts like the city, thought, experience, identity and collective consciousness.
On the level of the basic construction, the starting point is the re-examination of the personal history, personal thought and experience are re-examined without bias. Leaning on the theory of experience, it was Maurizio Ferraris who analyzed the tendencies that act passively within thought and experience. It emerges that a larger part of our experience, regardless how refined it can become, heavily relies on an already clear terrain on which conceptual schemes organize knowledge. It was this premises that has been taken as the dominant one for the elaboration of the topic in which certain histographical values and information are perceived as subjects of visual analysis and articulation. In such a context, the aim is not to put personal memories in the forefront but to create a mediated connection that sees the function of an urban mechanism as a subject for research. That connection is often subordinated to gentle parody. In fact, the existing objects should in the eyes of “ordinary” citizens be associated with functionality while remaining unfathomable outside its basic utilitarian function. Thus, they are written into the consciousness as an institutional form of knowledge and as such they influence a specific system of seeing and representation of reality. Therefore, this is a study dealing with the obsessive (historical) interest to implant something as a general truth, that is contrary to the idea of functionality that the city imposes and it demonstrates that the city is actually based on a opposite idea.
On a broader plane, the works test one’s own position within collective and individual memories. The things that are represented in them always occur in a much mediated form. Their multiplication demands a rational gaze of extended duration: a contemplative and active one. Using the procedure of documentation, post-processing and interpretation, the works should activate certain codes of recognition taking into consideration the historical, social and demographic context. Repetitioning the image from one picture to another neither changes it nor does it evolve, despite attempts to decompose it from another plane by an analogy of coloristic relation. The repetition of disassembled objects reflects its own spirit and on the other hand it can be read as an unrevealed signifier of historical events. Thus, although the interpreted objects point to a personal past, they simultaneously impose global questions regarding the history of a social context and the arbitrary nature of identity.
Translation: Vanda Perović
Photo: N. Ivanović