Katarina Ivanišin Kardum: “Birds”

February 12th – March 8th 2024

Imbued with Photography

In a strange, somewhat uncanny way, especially when these museological “devices” store taxidermies, dioramas combine the shot that caused the death of an animal, together with the recording of the image that lends time to the scene. Upon completing her studies, Katarina Ivanišin Kardum found employment at the Natural History Museum in Dubrovnik. She had recollections of the institution from her childhood, previously located in a Benedictine monastery, while in the new space intended to house the museum – a palace in the midst of the Old Town, itself becoming a diorama of sorts, a longed-for place in which endless troops of tourists take a peek in search of “their own” photo – she devises ways to acquaint museum visitors with its points of interest.

Dioramas are constructed spaces, for a long time used to envision landscapes and different animal habitats, but also to render home interiors and various other scenographies, which needed to be incorporated into museum displays. The three-dimensional recreated environment of a natural habitat, which is today replaced by VR-goggles and other digital aids, was once supposed to facilitate the understanding of a certain natural phenomenon in a museum. But the dioramas that the artist came across are remnants of a certain time and specific museological decisions (as well as possibilities). She discovers abandoned, decommissioned museum exhibits draped in protective plastic cover. Having been deprived of life long ago, they lost their meaning within the new set-up. In a way, it is a paradoxical relationship between nature and culture, whereby two devices – a photographic camera and a diorama – point to the complex and ambiguous relationships between the beauty of the natural world and its destruction. The spirit of the past is recorded in the photographs (i.e., their reproductions) of museum taxidermist Andrija Lesinger, in which bygone stagings bear witness to the modest decorative details that were available and among which the spirit of once free-living creatures lingers.

Looking at the reproductions of old black-and-white photos of dioramas, I think about Arcadia, a place of idyllic repose, but also a location prompting a sense of discomfort, even anxiety. Motionless, dusty, reduced to “expired” museological material, dioramas (and their photographic representations) are scenes at which children no longer point their fingers, wondering what the animals see and what happened to them. Without shadows and concrete time, dioramas are memento mori; spatial images, or three-dimensional stagings, in the instance of Dubrovnik, deprived of the customary painted backgrounds that were the artistic representations of landscape.

Photo reproductions of old dioramas and the remains of museological exhibits, draped in plastic, cover confront us with death, immanently inscribed in the footage. Barthes says that the gaze does not desist – it lasts with the photograph, transcending time. Katarina’s photographs, like the ones Barthes writes about, bring the viewer to “the point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being”. Or, as she herself states, “I take photos hurriedly – I record their state of being alive, that they are at least for a moment imbued with light again. Everything lasts for one long breath, that is albeit never deep enough.”

Sandra Križić Roban

Katarina Ivanišin Kardum (Dubrovnik, 1975) graduated in Painting from the City and Guilds of London Art School in 1998, after which she completed a two-year postgraduate degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2000. Between 2000 and 2008, in addition to her independent artistic work, she taught painting at the graduate programme of the City and Guilds of London Art School. In addition to her artistic work, after returning to Croatia in 2009, she also worked as a curator and educator, first at the Natural History Museum in Dubrovnik, and then at the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum in Zagreb. She is the winner of the T-HT nagrada@msu.hr First Prize (2015). She published the art book De Materia Avium (Art Workshop Lazareti, 2017), in which she portrayed her encounter with stuffed birds in archival photos and in the storage room of the Dubrovnik Natural History Museum and its aftereffect. She lives and works in Dubrovnik, Zagreb and Durrës.

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

This post is also available in: Croatian