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Iva Korenčić: “Field notes revisited”

The Spot Gallery and the Office for Photography announce the exhibition Field notes revisited by the artist Iva Korenčić. The exhibition opening will be held on 21st November 2023 at 7 p.m.

Iva Korenčić, Field notes, 2016/17

In psychotherapy practice, there are numerous techniques that aid people to more easily face painful and intimate topics from their own past. Mirroring is one of the techniques by which the therapist, copying the behavioural patterns of their client, attempts to encourage them to note how others perceive them. Developing her own photographic practice of mirroring, Iva Korenčić establishes a dialogue with sections of her own identity that have partially or completely disappeared over time. Surrendered to the spontaneous and intuitive act of photographing, the artist mirrors her personal experiences with natural processes and phenomena in order to observe the similarities and differences between subjective and objective changes in a given interval of time. While working on the project Field notes (2016/17), the daily routine of eight-hour photograph-taking turned into an obsession of sorts, engendering a rich photographic archive. Just as daily trips to various places around Zagreb, such as the mountain Medvednica, the hills of Samobor, park Jelenovac, forest park Grmoščica and others, were once part of her artistic practice, seven years later, returning to that digital photographic archive forms the backbone of the project and the exhibition Field notes revisited.

With a clear reference to forensic practices, the exhibited photographs are reminiscent of crime scene photos, while Iva Korenčić, like a detective opening a cold case, attempts to organise her personal archival material. By creating blazes and markers, she establishes links between individual objects and presented photographs, allowing the visitors to move through the space with more clarity and to understand a very intimate, personal story. Korenčić strives to maintain an objective approach in the process, reconstructing the circumstances in which this vast compendium of photographs was taken, while at the same time attempting to discover whether the medium of photography can in fact be objective or if subjectivity is a feature intrinsically inscribed in it. The word ‘revisited’ in the exhibition title refers to ‘visiting’ the digital folders in which the photos were stored and the objects collected during the original project. The act of photographing and collecting objects was in a sense a mechanism for coping with traumatic events, and it is the encounter with such archival material that evokes associations with the artist’s complex emotional states of seven years ago. Time becomes a key factor for why she observes certain scenes in a completely different way so many years later. Indeed, in the moment of trying to escape a painful reality, we might not be ready to understand what it is we are running from, what we are even searching for and/or trying to capture, which is why photography becomes the perfect medium that could authentically record certain moments. However, with the passage of time, we perceive that, to a large degree, photography, just as observation, is an individual act. Therefore, it is necessary to return to the personal archive in order to better understand others, as well as ourselves.

Tena Starčević

IVA KORENČIĆ (1986) is a multimedia artist. She studied contemporary dance at SEAD in Salzburg (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance), as well as cinematography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She completed her MA in New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Her artistic practice explores the themes of identity and memory, or rather their reflection in different material traces. Her approach focuses on the artistic process, the conversion capabilities of the mediums, and the development of new artistic methodologies. Using various mediums such as sculpture, drawing, text, photography, video and spatial installation, she explores the concept of “choreography of attention”. Since 2009, she has been active as an author, director, videographer and photographer on a number of artistic projects. She has exhibited at group and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, at galleries Prozori, Academia Moderna, Lauba, Nova and SC, ULUPUH, the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Pogon Jedinstvo, and elsewhere. She is also engaged in pedagogical work and holds dance, art and multimedia workshops.

https://ivakorencic.wordpress.com/

The exhibition is supported by Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb, and Kultura Nova Foundation.

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