Ivona Vlašić: "Augenblick"

10th–28th March 2025

Set-up photos: Ivan Buvinić

In the blink of an eye… Augenblick

There is something unsettling about blurry photos, that almost instantly make us think of old albums; some were bound in leather, others had textile covers, with pages of thick paper inside, on which you could paste pictures, or insert them into those little paper, and later cellophane, corners. Those with a bit more skill could make small incisions in the background and insert the corners of the photos, but it was a solution not everyone subscribed to. When I come across such footage, I carefully extract the photos from these (en)tangled situations, which from today’s point of view seem archival and old-fashioned. The procedure itself is not simple because the pictures resist and do not always acquiesce to being returned to a safe environment. And then the sheets of blurry paper in between, sometimes with patterns that resemble a spider’s web, with slightly rippled “threads”. I activate this entire memory “inventory” prompted by the photos Ivona Vlašić takes, or rather, appropriates from other people’s photos, shooting them through blurry tracing paper – old snapshots that are always intriguing, pictures that remind us of something we know, but is still foreign to us.

Perhaps intuitively, we will refer to history, a past time, and the accumulated knowledge we feel an urge to apply in an effort to understand the scenes before us. But in this case, it is not advisable to indulge in the knowledge of general history, which simply separates the photographs from the specific conditions in which they were created. Many power(ful) relations are inscribed in these, even in the seemingly inconsequential pictures focusing on the seams of the stockings worn by two women shot from behind, somehow inappropriately bent forward (or are we overburdened by appropriateness?). A headless drummer boy, a scene reminiscent of a movie we once saw (The Tin Drum), is actually a spectre that refuses to grow up while continuously forewarning us of the rising fascism. No one explains art to a dead hare; there is no Beuys’ embrace, only the dead body of an animal.

To some extent, we have the opportunity to recapitulate both the artist’s and our own memories about the process of growing up, or of remembering events that hold value for us for some reason. Photographs that Ivona Vlašić borrows from the press, or the vernacular found, “nobody’s” pictures, which she re-records and re-frames – thus altering their composition and meaning – all of these images are not historical “evidence”, but objects that, arranged in a certain way, in different sizes and mutual relationships, afford the viewers a position to ask questions. Meanwhile, the original conditions of meaning-making remain uncertain, left to the Augenblick, a moment of the viewer’s focus, attention and interest.

Sandra Križić Roban

IVONA VLAŠIĆ (Dubrovnik, 1968) studied painting in the class of professor Gerhard Lojen at the Höhere technische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt Graz Ortweinschule – Meisterklasse Malerei. She creative endeavour resides within the multimedia idiom. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Independent Artists, the Lazareti Art Workshop, the Croatian Association of Fine Artists Dubrovnik and the Croatian Association of Fine Artists Zagreb. She exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions and other events in Croatia and abroad. She lives and works in Dubrovnik. The Augenblick series was created during 2023–24.