12. june – 12. july, 2021.
„Wherever It passed, worlds would be transformed by cataclysms more terrible than any earthquake that had ever struck the Planet since its very beginnings. Wherever It passed, It would transmit fear, hatred and frenzy to those with the misfortune to go mad at once from Its touch; to those lucky enough to go mad it would transmit some other consciousness whose very nature no one would ever be able to penetrate.”
Borislav Pekić, Rabies
The long-awaited solo exhibition of Ema Bregović comes at a rather peculiar moment. Don’t worry prompts us to reflect on the circumstances, conditions and relationships in which sudden twists or changes of meaning gain their new social potential. Nothing is ever as it seems. Uncertainty, present in all social phenomena, is conveyed through openly manifested artist’s messages: a nest which holds bombs instead of eggs, cradles made of barbed wire, a Faberge egg with a rubber duck inside, instead of a gift…
The works’ monumentality, complex production, shiny aluminium and brass, all serve to create the impression of grandiose absurdity, yet keeping the aesthetic unaffected. Precisely all these elements of Ema’s art making—which is long, slow and painstaking—evince the potential of her youthful zeal, which brings vigour and audacity in tackling the fundamental themes. To that end, Ema stands shoulder to shoulder with the former generations of female sculptors who superbly represented the Yugoslav contemporary art scene.
With rather great expectations, the Saša Marčeta Foundation stages Ema Bregović’s works created over the last several years, along with photographs, sculptures and installations. We believe that at the moment when sculpture is going through a certain crisis, this exhibition will demonstrate a different sensibility and an example of a possible getting out of it.
Ksenija Samardžija
Symbolic content for the embodied viewer
Ema Bregović’s works resonate with the viewer quite directly owing to the recognisability of the forms and materials she uses and introduces to specific relationships, which initiate a fine interplay of cognitive and aesthetic aspects of one’s reception of artwork. A flag stuck in a corner and shoved into a pile of coal, cradles made of barbed wire, and a prayer rug tied to and slightly lifted up from the ground by a cluster of multicoloured balloons all rest on the logic of juxtaposition—a technique applied in visual arts since the early historical avant-gardes to generate hybrid images with strong inner tension, which arises from the irreducible divergence of associative planes they evoke and semantic implications they count on. This is where the history of art and popular cultures meet, and so do the objects, both mundane and sophisticated. What’s more, her approach evinces a great deal of lightness and benevolence, healthy humour and an ironic departure from standard classifications and hierarchization of images and shapes, particularly avoiding categorical determinants ascribed to them by identity politics, be it based on religious, ethnic, social or gender premises.
The images and shapes that Ema Bregović appropriates, recombines, rearticulates, arranges in diverse spatial constellations, or re-executes in materials and contexts quite different from those in which they are normally found, are not overly culture-specific and as such require no special competences to be identified. Even when regarded as belonging, in their original sense, to certain strictly defined traditions, today they circulate so widely in directions which, by dint of the globalized digital sphere, constantly and rather inevitably transcend the borders of cultures, that it is very much safe to say they bear trans-cultural recognisability and a potential to evoke in every viewer a myriad of other associations—those which are not necessarily rooted in previously experienced encounters with unfamiliar contents excluded from the usual everyday living. To that end, Ema Bregović neither designs nor makes works meant only for the audiences that can be unmistakably located on geopolitical maps or within biopolitical agendas.
Educated in France, yet firmly clinging to her ex-Yugoslav origin, she does not belong to any form of the dominant diasporic cultures, and even when we do recognize the elements of her background in her works, it is quite obvious she does not manipulate them. Entirely free from exoticization in any of their segments, these works certainly do not count on some sideway glance that expects to find there a culture-specific story of identity and belonging. This, however, does not make her works impersonal, nor does it mean they have been made in a vacuum, outside of any cultural influences. They, by all means, evince a personal touch and could easily tell the artist’s life story. The artist often provides the key to such reading in the texts that accompany her artwork. However, in any exhibitive space where they can be viewed as works of contemporary art, these pieces in their interrelation with the audience function perfectly well even without the provided narrative. Each new display within another context imbues the works with new layers of meaning, which emerge precisely from the new viewers’ experiences, allowing her artwork to achieve its full range.
Ema Bregović often inserts into her work easily identifiable symbols, some of which have gained this status precisely in the era we are experiencing right now (such as lifejackets and the yellow duck), while others are already deeply rooted in the field of our collective memory (the cradles, the flag and the prayer mat). She steers clear from linking them to concrete events or locations such as Belgrade, Hong Kong or Sao Paolo protests where the yellow duck grew up to be their common denominator, or piles of lifejackets on Lesbos serving as a disturbing memento of the fates of over a million migrants who wore them as they were crossing the sea, and particularly of hundreds of them who have drowned trying. Instead, she relies on implications of every instance of the symbols’ powerful poignancy to extend the scope of the narrative told by her works and utilize the symbols on a more general level. The yellow duck is in this exhibition for the first time placed in a meticulously executed ovoid sculptural form resembling a gigantic version of a Fabergé egg. Made, however, in a material considered non-expensive, it is simply a negative reply to the question: is there anything more worthy of being kept in such an exceptional place than the symbol of insurgency and non-acceptance of the state of affairs in which people feel disgraced and sacrificed for the benefits of others, by the very system which is supposed to protect them?
The lifejacket, cradle and burka are objects whose primary function is to cover and protect the human body and, thus, their appearance ineluctably implies corporeality—even though the body is actually absent. In the exhibition, we perceive them as objects placed within the concrete physical space of the setup—as constituents of the installations, or motifs in the photographs; as such, owing to their position within the formal structure of the works, they penetrate the field of the viewer’s embodied experience. Yet, at the very same time, they serve to trigger imaginary projections which are neither reduced to their physicality, nor to their formal features. The body of the viewer inevitably enters into a relationship with the bodies to whom the lifejacket was or could be the last safeguard from disappearing into the water abyss after having lost all other supports, or with the cradle made of the material whose primary function is to inflict pain and leave marks on the skin, or with the body which uncovered and unveiled, in a certain socio-political, religious or cultural context, would be condemned and treated as being intentionally exposed to lustful looks and susceptible to being objectified by the viewer. With regards to these particular works, neither lifejackets, nor cradle, nor burka have been previously used and they have not been appropriated for their indexicality, which is the case with many artists who conceive of their artwork as testimonies of the traumas of their time. These objects have found their place within the works’ structure as elements with symbolic meaning. When confronted with the artwork, the visitors’ imagination prompts them to inscribe their bodily experience into the frameworks of the given symbols.
The prayer rug elevated by the balloons as well as the slippers ascended by Hermes’s wings impart yet another dimension to the exhibition. They point to the imagination’s possible step forward, beyond the boundaries of the experience defined by a particular life situation in which the viewer finds himself. That step forward may be understood as a form of confessionally defined transcendence, and this interpretation is worthy of entertaining, yet it is not necessarily the only one. It can also be observed in relation to defined territories, which have been confirmed over and over again by various forms of social normativities, or to a pipe dream of deterritorialization, which would then occur as a triumph of radical openness towards the possibility of change within the immanence of everyday existence, that is, transition into a space which is not beyond the boundaries of experience, but outside the range of effects of its normative structuring—like a limitless space where only relationships, movements and feelings can be detected, instead of determined positions used to defend a territory.
As opposed to the ascending objects, there stands a gigantic steel needle threaded with barbed wire—a material which cannot be observed isolated from all the fencing processes for which it has been used over the course of history, be it to fence in one’s property, or war trenches so as to determine the front parameter, or populations of people in various forms of either refugee, labour or concentration camps. In each of the aforementioned cases it served to secure the distinction between the included and the excluded, between an inside and an outside, that is, to determine and ensure some sort of imposed spatial order, as a form of boundary which may be quite painful to cross. Although in this work she employs it as a connecting agent—a tool for stitching—our intuition makes it clear that virtually anything sewn with a needle which uses barbed wire as a thread would eventually end up being ripped apart, which is, in effect, a true picture of any form of fence. This work demonstrates that such stitching, which constantly takes place on both the material and symbolic level, connects the signifiers with the signified and stabilizes the meaning of a certain phenomenon, process, person or deed, thus providing a higher level of their internal homogenisation. At the same time, it establishes dichotomies which further, in a negative sense, strengthen its meaning and significance, giving rise to the codification and standardisation of language as a clearly defined differential system, whose rigidity art, in all its forms of expression, has always been actively opposing.
Stevan Vuković