Ivana Pegan

The Forbidden City, 2024

 

 

From the text by Helena Puhara:

 

 “Despite being a trained sculptor, Ivana Pegan creates her artworks in different mediums, while words, i.e. written, typed, spoken or sung voices, become her primary working tools. She might shape her signature artistic expression for gallery spaces and their knowledgeable audiences or for randomly selected public spaces with equal enthusiasm. The Forbidden City is an art form intended for and adapted to the radio audience. Here, as in most of her works, Ivana will use words, sung or spoken, like pigment, applying it, lending it shape and form, in quick strokes or long, with outstretched or short movements of the brush. The words will articulate warmth or coldness, in perceptual layers, suggestively and hypnotically. The spoken or sung voices are thus transformed from a primary, ethereal and fluid form, into a ‘materialized’ invisible object possessed of its own volume, and physically feel in space. In her work, Ivana will often intertwine Hrvoje Pejaković’s poetry alongside her own texts and verses, creating entirely new melancholic spaces in which this adopted spoken word becomes both immanently universal and deeply personal. The Forbidden City is a contemplative description of the soul, measured by the metric of the city.”

 

texts: Hrvoje Pejaković and Ivana Pegan
idea and recording by: Ivana Pegan
director: Ante Vlahinić
Special thanks to artist Jelena Milušić for vocals on Who Will Love Me Now)

 

North Corner, 2021

 

The thematic backbone is the exploration of subjective space. Through the relationship between photography and language, I open up the possibility of viewing photography as a performative medium. I incorporate the voice of the poet Hrvoje Pejaković into the photographic recordings of my own moment.

Once upon a time, 2018–2020

 

The photographic diptychs from the series are action-based, procedural low-budget small-format works, created in a room with the means at my disposal. I choose photos from my own archive intuitively and on the basis of associations and autobiographical implications. Using prints on drawing papers, I paint the subjective space and time in which I include my voice.

 

Inclined over my longing and my twilights, I leave my own trace by imprinting my idea of life as an endless series of anticipations.

A Thousand Words, 2017

 

The series was created on the occasion of the promotion of the author’s artist’s book Deserted Words, published in the Book art edition, Art Workshop Lazareti 2016.

 

The book is a follow-up to the spoken word work project Lead Me, produced as part of the wider project “City candidate: Disclosure” and performed in a public space on the occasion of Dubrovnik’s candidacy for the European Capital of Culture. During the visit to the location, visitors were given an audio player, and could choose the language and/or the guide so that while walking and looking around, they could listen to the Voice, inviting them to perform various actions that introduce them to their personal search for the one with whom/what they can establish a relationship. By enhancing the experience in relation to the event, the aim was to try to change the way visitors observe and see the scenes of the city and the people around them.

 

The thematic backbone of the A Thousand Words series is the research of photography as a performative medium, and the possibilities of experience and comprehension through the relationship between photography and language, voice and speech.

DU TV, 2010

 

The author photographs a television set at the moment broadcasting the Dubrovnik Television programme. The TV camera is placed up inside the Bell Tower broadcasting a live transmission from the main pedestrian street, Stradun. Pegan notices the emptiness and the rare passers-by who appear on TV in solitary motion, on a rainy day in ‘the street of the world’.

 

The series of black-and-white descriptions of winter, rain, and the emptiness of the City, stripped of all superfluousness and calm in the presence of ‘itself’, is created in a single day. In a conceptual move, Pegan creates photographic images that are a testament to reality, documents, notes. They function in the realm of pure spirit. The image is not sharp, abstracting, deep, grainy, etc. It examines the invisible in the visible. A photographic image is a minimalist work with layers of meaning. The artist portrays Dubrovnik, which carries a wound just like any other city in the world, but also has its own existence that is constantly happening.

 

Petra Golušić

Glass morning, 2004

 

Glass Morning is a performative and autobiographical series. It traces an existence in one time and space and depicts an infinity of small possibilities of their permeation.

The spoken word audio work Mindness, a 7-inch vinyl produced in collaboration with Art Workshop Lazareti Dubrovnik and MMSU Rijeka and co-financed by the City of Dubrovnik, was published in 2018 as a booklet accompanying a vinyl record.

From the vantage point of time of two times 7 years, it transmits the content and performance of a sonic work in a visual code.

 

Insert from the text by Ksenija Orelj:

 

"Even in her most recent works, Mindness and Put your faith in, Ivana remains preoccupied with voice, with that wondrous instrument that enables us to form relations that surpass semantics, relations based on meaning and intuition. We listen to bits of communicative exchanges and hear reflections of inner states; we listen to what is audible, but we hear things that remain unspoken, things that may be recognized in vibrations and resonances, in those 'silent' gaps, or in those moments when voice fades away or melts with other sounds. We follow the stretches of Ivana’s vocal choreographies, from soft utterings to ecstatic assertions; from gentle tones to more determined ones. Her voice is both supple and raw, what makes it different from a voice of a professional speaker. It sounds potentially seductive and so attracts our attention. Sometimes it comes across as vulnerable, at other times bitter. Occasionally it is peaceful or inquisitive and sounds as if on a quest. Her voice is pursuing reconciliation with its 'ghostlike' substitute, at the same time trying to keep its ironic distance. It takes us into an almost random vortex of affirmative, inquisitive and imperative forms so we are left wondering: is this a cry for interaction or a command disguised as polite request? This discrepancy between the attempt of revealing oneself and the resistance to being exposed defines that zone of ambiguity that we step into when we relate to others, when we neither loosen up completely nor oppose directly but rather reserve some space for possible retreat in order to keep distance and protect our personal space.  In order to remain clearheaded… Yet, Ivana leaves this moderation, as a standard of implicit speech and social acceptability, aside. Instead, she employs humor and irony and plays with our fears of losing the 'proper' mechanisms of defending our personal space. 'I betray. You?... I lick…. You?... Long live freedom...'."