Klub Kocka Gallery, Youth Center Split, Ulica slobode 28
OPENING: Thursday, March 21st 2024 at 8pm
The exhibit is open every work day untill March 28th.
ABOUT THE WORK:
In her work I Think I Remember, through the language of experimental documentary film, the author explores the fragmentation of memories presented in the form of short diary entries. The experience of memory as an image, with its content and duration, conceptually directs the work towards deconstructing film form into the media of image and sound. Recollection and rumination on memories in the mind, whose content is unstable over time and subject to distortions, require patience and a continuous contemplative process that the author instinctively conducts through the exploration of the medium of visual representation. Through documented intervention using optical aids on recorded material, the interpretive capacity of the image is examined, revealing new expressive possibilities on a formal level. Depending on the movement of convex or concave mirrors, or the magnification of various degrees and angles of shooting, the perception of the original images changes, now flickering, overflowing, disappearing, emerging again, losing sharpness, and fading like memories.
Reflections of photographs and footage in the mirror point to a dual nature common to the actual and mental image: past and present, subject and object coexist. Through recollection, events are relived and critically examined by looking into the past. Human internal, subjective time is interrupted and fragmented, contrasting with the normative, chronological time that flows continuously like the film image. Through the editing of recorded material, film time is manipulated, establishing a whole that resists objective narrative by evoking the logic of psychological time. Each new invocation of a mental image of an event, as well as the repeated recording of collected material, distorts or restructures reality, rejecting the idea of literal reconstruction of memory, and poetically reviving their embodied emotions.
The visual representation of fragments of the past in the form of diary entries is a continuation of the long tradition of women’s writing in the history of literature expressed through the medium of experimental film. Hence, there is a clear need for expressive possibilities of text that precisely shapes the nuances of meaning in the depicted images, whose interpretation is much more open. An audio collage of atmospheric sounds, instrumental or humming melodies, creates a sound landscape that integrates visual fragments into a unified whole. At the same time, Bistričić emphasizes the intimate nature of her work in the narrative elements of the composition. Our experience of memory, often resembling a dream, is finally reflected through an ambient audiovisual installation, where unstable images emerge in the darkness of the gallery, while the meta-photographic structure of the work, based on reflections, processability, and exploration of media, is expressed through its presentation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sanja Bistričić Srića (Zadar, 1982.) is a multimedia artist, photographer, and cinematographer. In her work, she explores docu-fiction and personal themes through the deconstruction and collage of image, sound, and text media. After completing her studies in agronomy at the University of Zagreb, she obtained a master’s degree in Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (2020). She has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, 2021), the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Zagreb, 2012), UK Parobrod (Belgrade, 2014), Gallery Prozori (Zagreb, 2022), and Gallery Flora (Dubrovnik, 2022). Her fashion and documentary photographs have been published in numerous Croatian and international print and online publications, and she has participated as a cinematographer in numerous film, exhibition, and fashion projects. She is a co-founder and member of the multidisciplinary collective RA’AH, focused on the exploration and overlap of fashion and visual arts. She lives and works in Zagreb.
IMPRESSUM
CURATOR: Jelena Šimundić Bendić
NMG CURATORIAL TEAM: Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov, Jelena Šimundić Bendić
DESIGN: Nikola Križanac
TRANSLATION: Katarina Duplančić
DOCUMENTATION: Tihana Mandušić
SETUP: Sanja Bistričić Srića, Tihana Mandušić, Jelena Šimundić Bendić
DONORS: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Split
MAVENA SUPPORTED BY: Zaklada Kultura nova
SPECIAL THANKS TO: KUM, MKC, PDM