Luka Pešun, "Wiped Clean"

The Spot Gallery and the Office for Photography invite you to the opening of the exhibition Wiped Clean by an artists Luka Pešun, which will be held on Monday, 9th September 2024, at 7:00 p.m. A lecture by Martin Kuhar on historical medical photography will take place on Wednesday, 18th September, at 7:00 p.m. (The Spot Gallery). The exhibition will remain open until Wednesday, 2nd October 2024.

Luka Pešun, “Wiped Clean”, 2024.

Luka Pešun dedicated the project WipedClean to his aunts, Ksenija and Marina, who experienced temporary amnesia. For him, their temporary loss of memory meant something much deeper than a medical phenomenon – it was an encounter with the fear of forgetting, something akin to death; not death as end of life, but death as absence in someone’s memory. Luka was not only worried about them, but about himself as well, fearing that they would not remember him. This fear, somewhat selfish and egocentric, reflects the value we place on being present in the memories of those we love. Just as Ksenija and Marina were temporarily deprived of consciousness, so Luka felt that he was deprived of the right to be present in their minds.

WipedClean reexamines the importance of memory through the prism of philosophical concepts such as John Locke’s blank slate or Kazimir Malevich’s painting White on White, along the lines of which the author transforms the gallery into a clean space, a metaphor for the loss and restoration of identity. The project combines photography and VR technology to evoke the phenomenon of short-term memory loss. It is inspired by the personal stories of Luka and his aunts, guiding the visitors through the experience of memory loss – by means of VR glasses, they are immersed in a world, the same space where objects and people instantly disappear, just as entire episodes of life disappeared from the memory of Luka’s aunts. Philosophical ideas such as Derrida’s metaphysics of presence and the false memory syndrome act as reference points in examining the impermanence and subjectivity of memory. Derrida’s theory of deconstruction demonstrates the extent to which our perception of reality, and thus, our memories, are subject to destabilisation and change, while the false memory syndrome reveals how easily external influences can engender memories that seem real, even though they are entirely fictional.

Thus, instead of the author’s photographs, there is a photo of his aunts on the gallery wall and a fragmented photo-puzzle on the table, which includes Luka’s own memories, further emphasising the theme of memory loss and reflecting on how the artist coped with this experience. MRI scans of Ksenija and Marina’s heads and brains not only show the physical and medical aspect of the condition, but also open up questions about where memory is actually located, how it is stored, altered, or lost. The project also explores the paradox by which, although this is an authorial photographic solo exhibition, Luka is not the author of any of the exhibited photos. At the same time, as the author of the concept, he is very mindful of this primarily personal and intimate material, respecting the privacy and consent of those he portrays. The viewers become enmeshed in that world – in which they seem to disappear for a moment, by putting on or removing the VR goggles – leaving behind only the empty space and the family photo of the aunts on the gallery wall – a bridge between the real and the virtual, between two realities that cannot coexist simultaneously. This moment of absence and void attempts to reflect the experience of his aunts, who had no record of what they had experienced during their amnesia, once their memory returned. Space thus becomes the key element of the work – the only space any of us really know is the one in which we currently find ourselves.

It is an experience that not only removes the physicality of the viewer, but also deprives them of reflection, intensifying a sense of separation from the reality they have just departed. At the same time, the headphones, emitting white noise, further emphasise the isolation, making the difference between the real and the virtual world even more pronounced. WipedClean is not simply an exhibition, it is a layered and personal journey into understanding the power and fragility of memory. Luka Pešun uses VR technology and family stories to create an experience that invites us to question how memories shape our identity and how these memories, when we lose them or they become false, can significantly affect our perception of ourselves, challenging us to face the fragility of one’s own nature of existence.

Marta Radman

Luka Pešun (Zagreb, 1990) in his artwork uses the medium of photography to explore themes such as identity, family and belonging, being essentially concerned with context and how changing it inverts reading. He studied Fashion Design at the Faculty of Textile Technology and graduated in Photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in 2019. Winner of the 2016 Rector’s Award.

He has participated in various group and individual exhibitions. His diploma thesis work titled “Do it Within Your Four Walls” was exhibited in 2019 at the ADU Gallery f8 and as part of the Poreč Dox festival, and in 2022 in Pula as part of the Process 2022 event. A photograph from the graduation series was also exhibited on a billboard in Zagreb in 2020 as part of the Area/Surface 6 program. A portion of the wider cycle of the photographic series Domestic was exhibited in Split in 2021 as part of the qEXHIBITIONS program and later that year in Pula at the invitation of the association Proces. The following year, he presented the same work in Zagreb as a part of the 36th Youth Salon, under the theme “Parasites”. He presented the work titled Touch at the group exhibition Then and Again. Rethinking Ritual in Contemporary Balkans, held in Thessaloniki, Greece.