Montenegrin academic artists Irena Lagator Pejović i Ivan Šuković participate in the international exhibition "Ex Situ: Artistic positions on endangered biodiversity and coexistence of species" in Sarajevo, in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Lagator Pejović presents himself with the work "Lines, Values, Coexistence", which was created this year. It is an interactive installation that is an arrangement of many hand-wound gilded cotton fibers.
"This glittering ball is attached with knots to the nets at one end, while the other is free to be pulled out into the depths of the exhibition space through the interaction of the audience. This haptic connection with the work of art and the material enables its constant modification. The lines are in motion, the surfaces expand, the light are transformed into a significant physical but also critical ecological-economic engagement, because at the end of the exhibition they need to be returned to their original state, each line in a ball," said the artist.
She adds that the installation "works critically with the concepts of real and representational" and explains how.
"Through the material use of gold: as a natural element, as the background of an image he revolutionized Giotto assigning it a discourse and as a value, that is, a gold standard that ceases to be the basis of money from the 70s - the time of the dematerialization of the work of art and the decade in which Pasolini's a political essay about the disappearance of fireflies, pointing to the inextricable link between environmentalism and the crisis of neoliberalism. Initiating strategies of bio-culture, community and solidarity, the installation functions as a postulate to stop the spiral of extinction, exploitation and exclusion. In the context of cultural institutions, it provides working hours for the vulnerable to propose a new model of ecological awareness, community and symbiosis. What is on display here is our collective workforce. It becomes a lived experience and a document of testimony that our survival on the planet depends on our collective and shared responsibility for global biodiversity. This gilded horizon of artificial scrolls does not emphasize human particularities or the autonomy of the work of art, but the modesty, hope and urgent political relevance of art for ecological alternatives," she says.
Ivan Šuković's installation "Equilibrium" from 2022 reflects the tensions created by historical deposits between the categories of human and artificial, organic and inorganic, says the artist.
"The concept of this work follows my experience of the former spaces and their condition today which has been dramatically changed and which are characterized by unpredictability and panic in the face of losing control, if not hope completely. The solid root between two fragile surfaces attached by clamps refers to the restraint of vitality. Despite the pressure and despite all life's limitations, obstacles, fears and conventions, it survives and is a sign of the living and vital," explains Šuković.
The power of organic energy produced by the work marks a solid place of beginning, existence and a kind of injection of life into the general image of insecurity, adds Šuković.
In addition to them, the following are also represented: Darko Aleksovski, Lamija Čehajić, Danube Transformation, Agency for Agency, Anita Fuchs, Teuta Gatolin, Ernst Koslitsch, Polonca Lovšin, Ralo Mayer, Edith Payer, Nada Prlja, Lala Raščić, Oliver Ressler, Adrienn Ujhazi/Nemanja Milenković, Anna Vasof, Driant Zeneli, Dardan Zhegrova.
Individual and collective memory and experiences
Irena Lagator Pejović is an artist and theoretician of art. Her post-media artistic practice is focused on research and process. She is interested, she says, in imperceptible and paradoxical situations, linguistic and systemic constructions of our globalized age that seem to be irrelevant.
"By analyzing them, as well as the relationships between images and language, individual and collective experiences, she creates rhizomatic references for a critical understanding of modernity, showing that art can be a relevant social activity for shaping the future," her biography states.
Through his artistic practice, Ivan Šuković analyzes the processes of social reconstruction of postmemory, often emphasizing the autobiographical.
"He uses such archival material as a potential source for possible identification of the multi-layered temporal and spatial relationships, that is, the discovery of their many possible and inconsistent meanings," it is written in his biography.
Bonus video:
