Through the waves

In Walter Benjamin’s fragments “From the Midday Shadows”, the author recounts Schuler’s words that “every knowledge had to contain a speck of absurdity, just as we notice antique patterns in carpets or oriental friezes that always deviate a little from their monotony”. In other words, Benjamin continues, it is not the shifting from knowledge to knowledge that is crucial, but some delicate crack in each individual knowledge. It is an imperceptible sign of authenticity, which distinguishes it from any mass-produced goods created according to a template. We could see what is in front of us in the artprints of Marija Anđelković as just such a crack. The authenticity of the expression, I dare to write, the depiction of interior landscapes that erase the boundaries between spaces skilfully avoiding the temporality that could burden the frame of such a picture. The scenes look like internal spaces enlarged with a magnifying glass, which hide not only the mapping of mental states, but also a completely silent and unobtrusive cry for their naming. Because, through naming here, we can express the spiritual landscapes through which Marija’s graphics lead us through the underground corridors in which the secret names of her spiritual identities are hidden. A name within her image is the language spoken by the inner being of man himself. Since I believe that the feeling cannot be fully delivered through a picture, it is offered to us to, through the language we will use to name the picture, we find out the named intimacy with which Maria reveals herself to us with this exhibition. It seems to me that only if we dare to recognize and name her artprints, regardless of the fact that the artist titled them “Silver Wave”, we are gifted with the knowledge that, like “Silver linings” in Chet Baker’s song, outlines and gives a stamp to each print with the most meticulous outline. For, it is precisely the name through which man’s spiritual being is communicated to the Other. By doing so, we are entering a relationship with the artist, and at that moment we can engage in the seemingly unfinished repetitiveness of the video work, in which irreproducibility and permanence of the image are as intertwined as bravity and recurrence in reproduction.

Text: Saša Pajković

Photo: N. Ivanović