Voli Me / Ne Voli Me

 

On Monday night, an exhibition of illustrations- Voli Me / Ne Voli Me opened on the top floor of the national gallery. Featuring a mixture of Croatian and BiH illustrators, the exhibition is being held as part of the Pazi! Knjiga festival, whose events are happening mainly in Zagreb.

The artists involved were invited to interpret the theme (Loves Me / Loves Me Not in English) as broadly as possible and the show is an engaging collage of whimsy, symbolism and introspection. In addition to the entries of the illustrators, two names from other fields of the arts were invited to contribute- the prolific Milomir Kovačević, and a video piece from Ismar Mujezinović.

Emir Durmišević

The visual styles adopted were in places surprising and innovative. Emir Durmišević’s steely, spare, detailed image drew heavily on mediavelism and and legend, cleverly incorporating a picture-within-a-picture to open out the dilemma facing his main female character. Durmišević’s image also leans heavily on contemporary gaming imagery, which his practice as an illustrator focuses on.

Maja Zećo

Others, such as Edita Gazibara and Maja Zećo, enjoy metaphorical play; Edita with open and closed furniture, Maja with a game of multiple, inconclusive noughts and crosses in red on a white background. Elvis Dolić exploits the cloak of a gigantic organic form in his piece, whilst Ždenko Bašić, with his two male figures sat with their backs to one another, creates a complicated, layered piece that invites repeated looking.

One of the issues that was raised during the opening speeches was the difference in colouration; the Bosnian images were, largely, monochrome, with the Croatian illustrators seemingly much more ready to experiment with colour. I am not sure that we arrived at the reasons for this difference, but in any case Tomislav Tomić bucked the trend. Tomić showed a fascinating black and white Rackhamesque interplay of plants and insects, rhythmically interlinked and visually mysterious. This uncertain and slightly sinister fantasy world that belies his background in children’s illustration.

Aleksandra Knezević (left), organiser of the show in Sarajevo, at the opening.with Ane Đokić, organiser of the project overall

Also noteworthy was the minimalist watercolour drops by Sanja Pribić; one drop of pure aquamarine, becoming two- simple but extremely effective and visually distinctive from the busy images that surround it. And Davor Pavelić has a delightful small diptych here, featuring a trademark cobalt blue and red contrast, and carefully mixing the visual metaphors of construction and theatre; the overall appearance is of a late 1920s theatre poster, updated for our times.

Davor Pavelić (detail)

Ismar Mujezinović’s video piece breaks up the array of illustrations and adds a visceral ballast to the whole show. The film shows a barefoot man walking ginerly on a wooden floor with nails sticking out of it; some flattened to the surface, others spiking out into his space without pity. The implicit interplay of relief and pain is an unexpectedly frank intervention in the theme.

Overall this is a show fizzing with visual invention and energy and with more than the occasional surprise. It is only on until next Monday, so catch it while you can.

Jon Blackwood

Voli Me / Ne Voli Me, a part of the Pazi! Knjiga festival programme for 2013,  is open now on the top floor of the National Gallery of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and will run until the 28th October. Admission free.

Venetian Snares (1)

Opening week at the Venice biennale is already drifting into the mists of time, so before it disappears completely, I’d better write the long planned article about some of the highlights of the pavillions, with a particular focus on the ex-Yugoslav republics.

One of the key cultural events of this year’s biennale, was the appearance of Kosovo as an independent republic, for the first time. Curated by Katrin Rhomberg, this was a one-piece show by the young artist Petrit Halilaj, in the Arsenale. Halilaj’s career has been on a steady upward curve for the last three or four years; based in Berlin, the artist has already extensively exhibited in Germany, and has solo shows planned for the next twelve months in Brussels, Kassel, and the National Gallery of Kosovo in Priština. It was clear to see that the official opening was genuinely emotional, a real visceral feeling amidst all the surface glitter of Venice, for the Kosovar delegation and their guests.

Halilaj’s installation also functions as an atavistic exclamation mark. His piece I’m hungry to keep you close…is initially a puzzling and claustrophobic experience. Tons of earth from Kosovo, mixed in with branches and twigs, form a little ecosystem in a small space, mounted ponderously on iron legs.

The mass of earth is formed in the shape of something akin to a 1970s-imagined spaceship; inside, the viewer walks slowly through a hollowed out core of musty, all-consuming, enveloping earth. Tons of material were transported from near to Halilaj’s home in Kosovo to Venice, to make the installation. As such, we are invited to think about travel, border-crossing, memory, and the ‘scripts’ of nationality and locality that are unwittingly coded into us, as part of our earliest experiences. The installation also provides a very deft metaphor for the experience of exile and life as an itinerant artist; Halilaj shuttles between two or three places regularly, in different countries, for family and career reasons. Overall this is a subtle and engaging piece of work, inviting the viewer to look again, repeatedly.

If Halilaj’s work was one of the major success stories of the Biennale from the South-Eastern European region, then Kata Mijatović’s Arhiv Snova (Archive of Dreams) project was certainly one of the more high profile. On the day I arrived in Venice, the artist was rowed down the Grand Canal in a white gondola, sleeping. By the time of the opening of the pavillion that evening, the white gondola had been laid out in the open air, a stroke already rowed in the  development of an avowedly relational show. Curator Branko Franchesci had a very tricky space to deal with – a poky, dimly lit corridor and a fairly small room where it was difficult to show the work effectively. The interactive content was the most interesting perhaps, with over 700 people having contributed their memories to date; those interested can keep up to date via the facebook page. What will be done with the information in the future, and how it is used, remains to be seen.

The BiH pavillion  in S. Samuele was nearby to two other regional pavillions- Montenegro and Slovenia.  For Montenegro, Irena Lagator Pejović’s Image Think exhibition showed four separate, rather beautiful minimalist sculptures and drawings, that animated a claustrophobic, tight space. This was particularly the case in the two tetrahedrons made from softly lit gold thread in a darkened space, one of the most striking memories of opening week- a piece called Further Than Beyond.

…Part Two, featuring Serbia, Macedonia, and the best of the rest (France, Poland, Romania) will be posted later.