Irena Lagator Pejović has been selected by curator Nataša Nikčević to represent the Montenegro Pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennial (June 1st through November 24th, 2013).
During our Skype conversation she talks about the project, titled “Image Think,” that she will be showing in Venice.
Vernissage: 30 May 2013, 18:30h, Montenegro Pavilion
Opening speech by Bazon Brock, artist and Professor of Aesthetics and Cultural Education at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal.
Palazzo Malipiero
San Marco 3078-3079/A
Ramo Malipiero Venezia – Ground Floor
Italy
The exhibition will present a selection of four works: Further than Beyond, Image Think, Ecce Mundi, and Camera Imaginata.
The first three works are special installations presented in three connected rooms: Golden, Black and White spaces. The last one, title Camera Imaginata, is an artistic intervention in the catalog of the exhibition.
Main aim of these special installations is mainly to question our personal and collective responsibility in relation to creation of images nowadays.
The first work, is a special light installation titled Further than Beyond. This work is made out of many thin golden cotton threads, an innumerable numbers of horizontally tense lines. They are illuminated by two light sources placed above the work. The intention of this installation is to actively engage the spectator into the work. Depending on the place where the visitor is standing and observing the work, he or she will notice a certain optical phenomenon that makes the work disappear thanks to the golden color of the threads. The material becomes immaterial. As per the intensity of the light source, you can perceive the golden aspect of the material but at the same time you witness its disappearance. This installation is questioning the meaning of value in this so called globalized world.
Leaving this room, we enter the second room, a “black box” entitled the “Image Think” and from which this pavilion takes its name. You enter a completely darkened setting, without apparently any light. But depending on the visitor’s movement and the time he is spending inside this work, his or her eyes will start to adapt to the new situation and he or she will start to perceive thousands of light sources coming from the very thin holes of the polyethylene out of which this “black box” is constructed. End then the visitor will also start to perceive that he or she is walking onto a floor made out of framed mirrors.
This is a language game: the word “image” and the verb “to think” are a certain reference to the novel 1984 by George Orwell. In particular it refers to his research on the power of images that can survive the deformation of language and any kind of totalitarian regime. How can the power of an individual, his imagination and his responsible critic of the society, survive the language degeneracy and the totalitarian power over the society? My idea was also to question what is the priority between thinking and imagining.
Exiting from the “black box” the visitor is offered another contradictory opportunity, that to enter a “white cube” called the Ecce Mundi. He enters this pace with the eyes still accustomed to the lack of light of the black box. This is why, when you enter this white room, you perceived it as an empty space. But the more you stay inside the space and after a closer inspection you notice that it is not an empty space and it is constructed out of hand-drawn canvases which are spreading over the walls, floor and ceiling. Here thousands and uncountable number of human stylized pictograms are rotating around their own vertical positions in the space. With this drawings, I wanted to underline the question of whether a society of peaceful coexistence is possible. The dramaturgy of the human presence is also revealed inside this space. The visitors are walking over the drawings, the paintings, and they seem like walking over other people. At the end of the exhibition, these paintings will be bearer of our passages, of our traces, of our consumption of the work of art, or of our consumption of society. Here is start to question what kind of consequences are we leaving as our presence in the world.
Exiting from the pavilion one, we can find the fourth work in the catalog of this exhibition. This work is called Camera Imaginata, and it is a simple drawing included in one of the pages of the catalog. The visitor is supposed to cut this page and construct a white cube by him or herself.
This white cube is rotating imagining into words. The interior sheets or walls of this cube are containing suggestions for the visitors, like “create love”, “feel the presence”, “multiply time”, “recall imagination”, and so on. So if we decides to construct our own Camera Imaginata the instructions and the suggestions for visitors are remaining in the space of our memory.
Irena Lagator Pejović was born in Céline, Montenegro, in 1976 where she lives and works. Selected group shows: 2013: The Sea Is My Land – artisti dal Mediterraneo. MAXXI, Rome, Italy. Curated by Francesco Bonami and Emanuela Mazzonis (forthcoming); Spring Exhibition 2013, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Subjective Maps/Disappearances, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik. 2011: Untitled (History), 12th Istanbul International Biennial. 2010: Orte/Nicht-Orte, Salzburger Kunstverein. 2004: Love it or Leave it, 5th Cetinje international biennial of contemporary art, Montenegro.
Awards: 2007: Transforming Memory. The Politics of Images, 24th Nadežda Petrović Memorial, Čačak, Serbia; 2002: Reconstruction, 4th Cetinje international biennial, Montenegro, UNESCO visual arts prize.
Grants: Artist-in-residence 2005–2006, Neue Galerie, Graz. 2005: Modelmania, with Olafur Eliasson and Yona Friedman, ArtExperience Domus Academy, Venice.
The catalogue contains essays by Nataša Nikčević, Irena Lagator Pejović and Bazon Brock.
Interview by Tiziana Casapietra
Special thanks to Federica Cimatti for organizing the conversation.