28th April – 7th May 2025
Set up photos: Ivan Buvinić
Continuing her visual exploration, in which she began examining emotional traces of memory and their materialisation through experimental photographic processes, Petra Šabić revisits the topographies etched in her memory, not as fixed points, but as shifting contours of past spaces. Captured scenes, recorded with precision in their daily transience, in the new series become multi-layered compositions in which time does not flow linearly, but disperses and pulses in different directions. Photomontages, preserved like organic samples under glass membranes, reveal fragments of places to which the artist returns not to preserve them, but to rearrange them anew. Their instinctively recorded spatial geometry intertwines with coloristic interventions and collage structures that attest to the emotional resonance of this looking back. In these pieces, for instance, colour is no longer simply an aesthetic layer, but a gentle attempt to seal the porous edges of memory. Each layering – whether it is a cut, a line or a randomly chosen textual fragment – acts as a seam on the fabric of memory, intuitive navigation through spaces that have disappeared outside of it, but continue to live on as an inner archive. Unlike contemporary digital or quick-acting analogue chemical processes in photography, cyanotype, with its unhurried and time-dependent development, treats time not only as a condition, but as the essential substance of the image. Thanks to this quality, the cyanotype prints that the artist deliberately halts before completing the process, become a metaphor for unfinished recollection – for a moment in which memory is still taking shape, sliding between clarity and haziness, creating transitions between presence and evanescence. These transitions evoke a state in which every image starts to resemble a shadow of its own reality, in which there is no conflict between memory and oblivion, but the tension is organic and subtle, like breathing. The photographs become akin to time capsules – they do not safeguard from the outside world the memory they contain within, but invite us to immerse ourselves in their fragility, to feel the transience and impermanence of that moment. Glass, which does not function as a boundary, but rather as a permeable membrane of the piece, allows the gaze, the sensations, and the interpretations to flow freely, intertwining and producing a mutual interdependence, in which memory, space and time are inter-connected in a dynamic and fluid relationship. The ambience of the exhibition space, through its different architectural elements, also allows each viewer to find their own interpretation, which may revive the feeling of past times. Ultimately, the artist does not archive the past in order to preserve it, instead exposing it to the constant flux of transformation and reminding us that no memory is final and that a return to past states of consciousness is never the same.
Leopold Rupnik
Petra Šabić (1995, Zagreb/Bjelovar) graduated in Arts Education (2019) in the class of associate professor Gordana Bakić, receiving the Academic Council of the Academy of Fine Arts award for best graduates in 2018/19, and earned her degree in Painting (2021) with Magna Cum Laude honours, in the class of full professor Ksenija Turčić at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She is the recipient of several honours and two Dean’s Awards for her studies, as well as the University of Zagreb Rector’s Award. She has exhibited at 15 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions, including international exhibitions in India and Vietnam. She won the Audience Award at the exhibition Erste Fragments 17 (2021) and created the 14th Artistic Solution for the poster on the façade of the CROZ building on the theme of Synaesthesia(2023). She also participated in the residency program De/Construction of Image in Leipzig (2024). She worked as a freelance associate for the Museum of Contemporary Art (2022) and on the project Days of Edo Murtić(2024, ALU), and is currently the coordinator of the Erasmus+ project Artists for Art Education (HDLU). To date, she has collaborated with numerous institutions, cultural centres and associations in organising and implementing artistic workshops, training programs and other cultural projects. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), and since 2023 of the Croatian Freelance Artists’ Association (HZSU).
