{"id":24871,"date":"2024-12-02T10:56:21","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T09:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/croatian-photography.com\/?p=24871"},"modified":"2025-03-03T08:43:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T07:43:34","slug":"sanja-mercep-in-reality-and-in-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/croatian-photography.com\/en\/sanja-mercep-in-reality-and-in-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Sanja Mer\u0107ep, “In Fact and in Fiction”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Spot Gallery, the Office for Photography, and Chair of Photography (Academy of Dramatic Arts) invite you to the opening of the exhibition In Fact and in Fiction <\/em><\/strong>by an artist Sanja Mer\u0107ep<\/strong>, which will be held on Monday, 9th December 2024<\/strong>, at 7:00 p.m.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>The exhibition will remain open until Friday, 20th December 2024.<\/p>\n

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From the\u00a0exhibiton’s foreword of Ana Fazeka\u0161<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

As her subject-matter, Mer\u0107ep chooses mountains, symbolically worn out by human trampling (in fact and in fiction), and asks how, if at all, they might be made to escape the machinery outside of which they exist in their full glory: out of sight. Photography is a medium of the frame; the artistic language of selecting and transferring a place where the visible world is cut and touches-without-mixing with another frame within a frame, that is, the world within a world. By gazing into a photograph, into a printout mediated by lens multiplication, we emerge from the reality that surrounds us by plunging deeper into the reality we recognise, in the sense of knowing too much: both inside and outside.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The cycle finds its complexity in simplicity, its critical sharpness in humour, its wholeness in detail, reality in what only resembles it. The titular syntagm both establishes and negates the unstable dichotomy with one-single stroke, sets and immediately breaks the contrast, suggesting a co-existence that, if we maintain our gaze, in a heartbeat becomes existence \u2013 always both, because the gaze is always both, both here and there: in reality and in fiction. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Artist statement<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the stage of the Egyptian Hall in London in 1852, author and mountaineer Albert Smith staged a performance in which he presented his mountaineering expedition to Mont Blanc. The performance was observed by over 500,000 visitors for whom this was their only contact with mountain peaks, while Charles Dickens wrote on that occasion that recently \u201can incredible number of travellers […] go up Mont Blanc, in fact and in fiction\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, more than 170 years later, a much larger number of people, including me, undertakes similar mountaineering expeditions. I spend all of my free weekends hiking, crossing kilometres of terrain in order to climb new peaks, visit new mountain ranges, explore new trails. In this project I decided to (de)construct my own fascination with highland landscapes and demystify the socially constructed modes of its representation. Therefore, in this series, I build my own symbolic mountain world where the solid boundaries between the real and the imaginary collapse, and I play with representations of mountains, my own memories, and the photographic process itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

SANJA MER\u0106EP<\/b> (ZAGREB, 1989) is a second year graduate student of Photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She previously graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb, followed by several years working in the advertising industry. This experience shaped her artistic interests, directing her towards researching topics such as the commercialisation of public space and the portrayal of hidden aspects of contemporary life. To date, she has had two solo exhibitions (Otok Gallery \u2013 ARL, f8Gallery \u2013 ADU). She is the author of the short film <\/span>We Almost Talked to Each Other<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The exhibition has been created as a collaboration between the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, and the Spot Gallery, as the graduation project of Sanja Mer\u0107ep. The project was made under the mentorship of doc. art. Bojan Mr\u0111enovi\u0107 and doc. dr. sc. Iva Prosoli.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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