Landscapes of Consciousness
Martyn Ferencz Gallery, Zsolnay Cultural Quarter, Pecs, Hungary
05.02.2015. – 05.03.2015.
Landscapes of Consciousness is a collective exhibition of four Croatian contemporary artists ,which, after Zagreb, Pula and Osijek, is visiting Pécs, thanks to the mediation of Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in the Republic of Hungary and the personal engagement of Mr. Bálint Szombathy, who facilitated the partnership of between the Zsolnay Cultural Quarter and the Vladimir Bužančić Gallery from Zagreb (New Zagreb Cultural Centre).
The exhibition contains works that are the results of the personal researches of Jasenka Bulj, Igor Zirojević, Damir Babić and Ivona Jurić, into both the capacities of the media they use – photography, painting and video – and into their spiritual questings. We found a raison d’être for presenting these works in common in the joint interests of the artists in exploring human perception, the relationship between inner and outer, physical space and mental. The exhibition addressed a particular quality of looking that is a result of the artist as subject standing back a little way from the object being looked at. An observer is present in the scenes, but is displaced and is not caught up in the situation. The observer takes in what we might conventionally call pretty and ugly, good and bad, useful and harmful – nature and the consequences of human action, tree and man, flowers and trashcan, the silence and the row of the big city – as a whole and reflects them just as they appear. Without expounding any critical judgement with respect to the motifs in the same scene, which in the standard cultural discourse are placed in semantic opposition to each other, the authors have endowed the scenes with a certain aura of silence. The figurative and almost realistic painting and the documentary photographic and video records, however, present and represent nothing. Unlike the conventional notions that inscribe meanings into events on the grounds of their references to a culturally grounded discourse, the scenes in the works of Jasenka Bulj, Igor Zirojević, Damir Babić and Ivona Jurić are free of signification. What they tell of simply is. Undisturbed by the mind, the paintings have become a master scene that reflect the landscapes of consciousness.
Anita Zlomislic
exhibition author and curator