February 12th – March 8th 2024
Set up photos: Ivan Buvinić
Photography as text, as performance, story…
Bringing together the seemingly impossible, telling a story not only for its content, but also owing to the way the artists lead into the narratives they have appropriated or written based on earlier research, could perhaps be the summary of this exhibition. How to encapsulate the artistic work of Ana Čavić and Neja Tomšič, while maintaining a focus on photography, which is, after all, our common interest?
We are familiar with Neja’s artistic discourse on ships that used to transport opium from five years ago, when she performed a storytelling performance on the subject as part of the Slovenian Weekend. By performing a tea ceremony, the visual artist, poet and writer introduces us to the forgotten episodes of world history from the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, when the tea and opium trade were among the most lucrative in the world. At the same time, this is a story of control introduced by the great European colonial powers and powerful private corporations. Reduced to photographic “evidence”, this series records elements in space – monuments, inscription plaques, places where something happened of which we nowadays possess scarce information, because we have included these spaces in our everyday life in which we rarely, if ever, question individual “stakes” of the past. Arranged in an unbound book, these locations are presented photographically in a very general, we might say, non-burdensome manner. Yet, the burdens arise from speech, from the text, the performance during which the details of this micro-history rise to the surface, that someone finally needed to say to our faces.
Ana Čavić’s works are visually starkly different – collages and works created by “cutting up” paper, a technique which post-feminist criticism will often attribute precisely to women. In their hands the scissors mercilessly cut out the unimportant, even the unwanted. Then, what remains? Visual poetry can seemingly aid us in reaching meaning, yet this verbal expression likewise relies on form, whereby the spaces between letters, signs and words are necessarily subjected to questioning. The writings are poetic, as are the visual representations in which the roles are left to women. The artist is simultaneously a storyteller who speaks of female characters she encounters in myths, folk tales, fairy tales, legends and other literary sources. Juxtaposed to visual works are poetic writings that we can assume convey the artist’s speech, or that of the (imaginary) character she depicts. All interpretations are valid, while the final meaning is subject to personal evaluations.
Both artists apply interdisciplinary practices, reach for the works of others, appropriate and modify, actualise stories from the past whose “loose ends” refuse to stand still. Both use visual tactics, text, capture details from the past, transmuting them into a contemporary visual language at the centre of which lie human relations burdened by colonial history, forgotten and hidden events embedded in our contemporary identities. Adroitly connecting historical periods and geographical spaces, both artists lay bare the fabric of modern society, reaching for an idiosyncratic visual and verbal female language that calls out to a desirable interlocutor.
Sandra Križić Roban
Ana Čavić (1979) is Ljubljana-based visual artist, performance artist, poet and researcher into performance-born self-publishing practices. In her interdisciplinary artistic practice, she works across different fields and media, which includes works on paper, artist publications, performances, digital poetry animation, and digitally assisted poetry/storytelling performances. Most recently, she has been exhibiting and performing her piece A thread without end (2017-), an ongoing series of storytelling performances in discrete acts featuring original poetry and visuals in various analogue and digital formats. She has also produced a new series Papercut Poetry (2020-), a collection of papercuts that function as visual poems, and a new series of collages reinterpreting female characters from myths, legends, fairy tales and literature for a contemporary audience, Mythopoeias (2020-). In 2023, she released the artist book Mythopoeias at Rostfrei Publishing.
Neja Tomšič (1982) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice merges research with drawing, video, poetry and performance. By uncovering overlooked and often hidden stories from history, her passion is to rethink dominant historical narratives, research into particularities, and create situations where new understandings of the present can be formed. She has been performing the Tea for Five: Opium Clippers for the past seven years internationally. Her artist book, Opium Clippers (Rostfrei Publishing, 2018), was awarded Best Slovenian artist book in 2017/2018 and Best book design at the Slovenian Book Fair. She is a founding member of the Nonument Group, an art collective that maps, archives and intervenes in forgotten, abandoned or demolished 20th-century monuments, public spaces and buildings, that have undergone a change in meaning.
