Katherine A. Carl
RE-ALIGNINGS? ARTMAKING IN THE SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEAN ENVIRONS OF MANIFESTA 3
(ART CRITICISM, VOL. 16, 2001)
Croatian artist Ksenija Turcic is concerned with creating and shaping space-physically, formally, emotionally and psychologically-in her video installations that grow out of sculptural practice. For example her dual projection video installation Phase (2001) portrays the faces of a man and a woman each occupying the space of their separate frames. Because of the placement, the two appear to be facing one another and nearly touching, yet they are occupied with wholly different concerns. The woman speaks softly and her eyes move furtively and pensively. Her voice, recounting intimate connections, trails off creating a distance: "1 remember each and everyone of your ... " "I know the meaning of your. .. " The man impassively completes mundane actions of everyday personal upkeep: he shaves slowly, drinks a glass of water, and eats, accompanied by a soundtrack of his breathing. His solemn self-sufficiency co-exists with her intense attempts at interaction. The tight framing pulls them close, yet their eyes never meet and the distance between their two worlds seems vast. However, the space created here is not a gulf pervaded with melancholy but an affecting and simple observation of different people's needs and actions. The work is dualistic but not essentially binary, as here (counter to the stereotype) the woman employs language but the man is characterized by bodily sounds and gestures. She looks at the camera, whereas his eyes are often cropped out of the frame. Turcic builds, with simple a web of emotions and gestures within each character's personal frame.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sandra Križić Roban
Instead of an image of the world, the image as Ksenija’s world
What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow, wrote Rabindranath Tagore. Shadows, though, come and go without leaving a trace. They have no capacity to tell a tale, and their changeable nature and dependence on certain factors prevents us from fi xing them in any way. They are just fissures in the flow of consciousness, dependent on the rhythm of someone’s movement that at one time is routinely repeated, making them similar, subsequently changing their properties and appearance. In most of the new works, Ksenija Turčić is going on with the stories that she started telling quite a while ago. I think that she started writing them intuitively at a time when she had no inkling that she was going to put in place, with a distribution of almost identical elements in space, a kind of marking, between the spans of which her energetic fi eld reposed. At the beginning, much of it seemed simple. The manner of action was minimal and very quiet, meditative and fi lled with specific energy that she channelled successfully in various media. In the spaces in which she allowed emptiness to substitute for solitariness she gradually detected energy. She appropriated a space with attenuated planar forms that she hung or layered in carefully devised installations, leaving enough room for the energy left over from some prior time to work. In this period, very sensitive for her, in which a great deal depended on intuition, the artist started to heighten the expressive aspects of the materials — the transparency of glass, the short life of plastic sheeting, the brittleness of mirrors, the commonness of plastic tubes. She gradually educated the viewers who moved in her exhibition fi elds with ease, not necessarily searching for a story, although it was felt there was one somewhere in the background. A bit later, she offered narratives in which it was possible to recognise both her and oneself. The stories are on the whole known to all and the contents are shared. In the video work The Witness (2011) Ksenija’s two eyes are the stages of actions that make their way through to us but partially. In each pupil is one scene — on the left, in a darkened space a man and a woman are standing. She is dressed; from a white chair, she takes clothing bit by bit, helping the man to dress. Her movements are protective, she helps him keep his balance until at the end they embrace and then go off, each one to his or her own side. In the Istinite priče second pupil, the same figures are standing opposite each other, undressed. This time the man stays bare, while helping his partner to dress. At the end, instead of a hug, he gets a slap. I look with some effort into Ksenija’s unblinking eyes, while in almost painful (media controlled) convulsion they watch a scene that contains the elements of everyday life, the mutual differences of which intrigue us. Is it possible to find out more? Why does getting dressed end with a slap; why are the relations between the fi gures unequal? Is their story personal, or is it a sample that symbolises common relationships? Looked at in the continuity of testing out and speaking about the man and woman relationship, The Witness is a continuation of her previous works, of out–of–focus internal views with which she endeavoured to represent what she saw. Or just imagined? The own–skin method, as astutely defi ned by Nada Beroš,1 is a constant in Ksenija’s creative strategy. It is the persevering membrane between worlds — external and internal, private and public body, which do not necessarily exist within a common semantic fi eld. Autobiography is anyway the product of different factors — of real experience mixed with what we have heard, seen, read, what we have been told and made up. Fact and fi ction are inextricably woven together.2 The Witness is part of the complex Ksenija relational space the borders of which are in motion. It is not easy to conclude the reason for this; experience somehow too patently intrudes itself as ideal explanation. In the exhibition context we can connect it with Looking (2000), a glass box placed next to a wall, in the lower surface of which two photographs are refl ected. One above the other, joined with an almost invisible transition at the line of the nose, there are two portraits of Ksenija, the upper with eyelids lowered, the lower with eyes wide open. While we look at them from in front, the direct gaze evades us; we can obtain this only after we peer towards the mirror from which, with uncommon precision and penetration, Ksenija’s eyes look at us. For Merleau–Ponty, sight is not a window into a ready–made world.3 One might rather say this is about resistance, about the thickness that must be overcome in order to arrive at — what? The personal experiential structure is used with an intention, but what is the purpose if we are deprived of narrative and context, among other things? The way in which we establish a relation with Ksenija’s works has never been unambiguous. It was necessary to look from the side for the body of her world to appear. After reception of the codes that she has sent us through the slightly opened door, her likeness would appear for a moment (Slow Motion, 2000) and the walls started to breathe with the rhythm of her inhalations (Light and Shadow, 2000). In the exhibition hall several hearts beat as one (True Stories, 2000), yet what did we actually gain by entering a space in which she mediates her own, and others’, experience? What she expected from us a few years ago — willingness to sharpen the sight so as to be able to distinguish something from a blurry image, is in the recent cycle reduced and simplifi ed. Thus Skin is reduced to three parts of the human body — cheek, palm and shoulder, behind the taut surface of which in the middle ground are seen the shadows and concavities of someone’s private topography. Touch me. My skin is not perfect, perhaps I have not tended it enough, have eaten too much sweet stuff, put on the wrong skin cream. But it is me, the way I am, while I pass through the multitude trying for someone to see, feel and touch me. Our personal archive is full of images and information that we do not need, at which we look, powerless to draw away the gaze. It is hard to determine the borders of reality outside of which the manipulated media space begins; on the computer monitors fl icker constantly new visual data, to which our attention is glued. It is impossible to separate what we see from what we believe, or what we are ready to take on trust. Where has the human skin vanished, perhaps imperfect in its appearance, yet capable of resisting the mendacious stimuli that form the tectonics of our quotidian? Is there beauty in the simplest possible scene of someone’s hand or cheek, of imperfect complexion, or did we long ago become dulled to the ordinary and the everyday, accustomed to the honed images (whose pixels, it is true, would so easily disperse if we just wanted it)? Digital art media have in the last few years led to the traditional concept of the image being increasingly considered as a processual model of art.4 And new concepts are being brought in — interaction, telematics and genetic image process — everything increasingly tending to a kind of fusion of perception that includes diverse human senses. Various artistic genres are implemented in the photographic image, everything together becoming part of the representation of the virtual space in which everything is possible, in which artifi cially created rules reign. A lot of this is used for the purpose of attaining illusions that are maximally convincing, and there is no wonder that in encounters with photographs we should have become circumspect, that we endeavour to understand whether the representation did once exist in some real space–time, or is everything that defi nes it the result of virtual reality and its codes. In the context of media history digital images have a different meaning from other representations, for in them “the differences between inside and outside,near and far, physical and virtual, biological and automatic, image and body are disappearing.”5 Immersion in such constructed structures, enabled, among other things, by the development of the media, puts us in the position of testing out the critical distance, the individual and collective competences that aid in the historicisation and interpretation of the material observed. Are we going to be able to incorporate the virtual, the computer–generated event into interpretative processes on which we have been at work for years, or will we be satis- fi ed with the new quality of pictures that succumbs to the incompetent eye? The question can be put differently: are we going to be satisfi ed with the quality of representation that works like the one–time, “imperfect” image whose role was not to succumb? It seems that we are on two sides of a passage, in which the metaphor of corridor does not facilitate solving the dilemma as to which side to enter, or to exit. One of the exits is “offered” in the scene of a digitally generated photograph Togetherness (2011). It was taken gradually, in different places in Zagreb, and unlike many similar scenes, was not taken from anonymous Internet sources. The faces on it seem familiar, but with more attentive observation, we will fi nd it hard to notice anyone we know. I would say that I was able to recognise just one person — a man in a blue overall; he is like a beggar who has for years now collected alms at the crossroads of Zagreb. Or was I mistaken? Why do I want to recognise someone? Is that a tribute we pay surrounded by the thousands of scenes that fl icker in our fi eld of vision? Would some positive identifi cation aid the understanding, or is just part of a game that has no winner? Media art, among other things, explores the aesthetic potentials of the interactive and processual image worlds.6 We might perhaps agree that this is an age of the culture of virtual images/representations that depends on the development of new interactive models, interfaces, where various activities, in principle innovative, take place. Images were once rare and individual, reserved for special places, and gradually through the fi ssures began to penetrate into many areas of everyday life. We are caught up in a matrix of images7 and “things that were formerly impossible to depict can now be represented; temporal and spatial parameters can be changed at will so that virtual spheres can be used as models or simulations for making specifi c types of experience”.8 What experience does Ksenija Turčić mediate with the photograph Togetherness? The urge for repetition I interpret as a component part of the analytical structure of observing, a search for an exception that we come upon with careful looking. “I see from only one point, but in my existence I am looked at fromall sides,”9 says Lacan. Do we become more aware of someone’s existence if the same likeness is multiply mediated by the photograph? However did she choose it, and how does she justify her choice? The simultaneous projection Where Are You Going (2011) is presented on the trapezoid bases of columns in the exhibition space of the Croatian Academy’s Glyptotheque. A simple narration reposes in the very structure of the work. We follow six female fi gures in various times of life, as they walk down a corridor, towards a door in the background of the scene that they will never reach. The rhythm corresponds to their age, from the running of a playful little girl to the slow walk of an old woman who uses a stick to help her. The projection is colourless, grey, devoid of the numerous layers of meaning that we would easily attribute to it if it were an ordinary video. But the somewhat unprepossessing surface draws the attention only with the occasional successive sample. How in today’s conditions of the extensive domination of brilliantly processed scenes can one interest the observer? In spite of the technological capacities that help in the creation of interactive imaginary worlds and depictions, Ksenija Turčić continues to be dedicated to themes the multiple sensitivity of which rests on personal experience. Her new, processed worlds are integrated into experience that we can recognise from before. The emphasis is on continuity, irrespective of her having at her disposal the new patterns of communication. Is the interpretation made more diffi cult thereby? Detached from the other pieces, the two–sided video projection Observing (2011) is a synchronised recording of obverse and reverse of various persons who pass in front of the camera, bending towards the lens. The position of the viewer is identifi ed with camera and camera person position and it seems as if we were coexisting in some world that only partially, in passing, integrates others’ views. As if we were placed behind a screen that could be that of the computer with which almost every day we establish some kind of relationship in our working space, while our bodies are slightly leaning forwards, ready to receive the information that comes in to our world. Instead of the look into the mirror, which she offered in some of her previous works, Ksenija Turčić resorts to the refl ecting image of the monitor or video projection surface thanks to which we are able to test out ourselves. To be honest, we are not interested in what happens to these people who in uneven rhythm alternate in the composition leaning forward to be able to see us better. More than anything else, we are interested in the reason why they are looking towards us, but the meanings evade us, blur and once again remain outside the focus. The narrative subject, the episode that it describes for us and at the end the whole of the work that unites it all are parts of Ksenija’s sequential archive in which we come across a combination of complex fi les and short notes. Unlike the aesthetic impression that was very important to her in previous spatial and video installations (Do ut des, The Garden, Sunt lacrimae rerum?, to mention just a few), the recent works are simplifi ed and in some way pared down. Reduced to grey, deprived of backgrounds and other references to a real context, they help in the determination of identity, the fi nding of a common rhythm to enable us at least briefl y to coexist in the exhibition space. Like the fi gures from True Stories, we share interpersonal experiences the content of which will remain concealed, defi ned only by the beating of the heart, while we are at once both close and distant. Briefly “unified” by the disturbing tone that recalls that all − the narrators, the stories and their actors — have their own shelf life.
Sandra Križić Roban
RE-ALIGNINGS? ARTMAKING IN THE SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEAN ENVIRONS OF MANIFESTA 3
(ART CRITICISM, VOL. 16, 2001)
Croatian artist Ksenija Turcic is concerned with creating and shaping space-physically, formally, emotionally and psychologically-in her video installations that grow out of sculptural practice. For example her dual projection video installation Phase (2001) portrays the faces of a man and a woman each occupying the space of their separate frames. Because of the placement, the two appear to be facing one another and nearly touching, yet they are occupied with wholly different concerns. The woman speaks softly and her eyes move furtively and pensively. Her voice, recounting intimate connections, trails off creating a distance: "1 remember each and everyone of your ... " "I know the meaning of your. .. " The man impassively completes mundane actions of everyday personal upkeep: he shaves slowly, drinks a glass of water, and eats, accompanied by a soundtrack of his breathing. His solemn self-sufficiency co-exists with her intense attempts at interaction. The tight framing pulls them close, yet their eyes never meet and the distance between their two worlds seems vast. However, the space created here is not a gulf pervaded with melancholy but an affecting and simple observation of different people's needs and actions. The work is dualistic but not essentially binary, as here (counter to the stereotype) the woman employs language but the man is characterized by bodily sounds and gestures. She looks at the camera, whereas his eyes are often cropped out of the frame. Turcic builds, with simple a web of emotions and gestures within each character's personal frame.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sandra Križić Roban
Instead of an image of the world, the image as Ksenija’s world
What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow, wrote Rabindranath Tagore. Shadows, though, come and go without leaving a trace. They have no capacity to tell a tale, and their changeable nature and dependence on certain factors prevents us from fi xing them in any way. They are just fissures in the flow of consciousness, dependent on the rhythm of someone’s movement that at one time is routinely repeated, making them similar, subsequently changing their properties and appearance. In most of the new works, Ksenija Turčić is going on with the stories that she started telling quite a while ago. I think that she started writing them intuitively at a time when she had no inkling that she was going to put in place, with a distribution of almost identical elements in space, a kind of marking, between the spans of which her energetic fi eld reposed. At the beginning, much of it seemed simple. The manner of action was minimal and very quiet, meditative and fi lled with specific energy that she channelled successfully in various media. In the spaces in which she allowed emptiness to substitute for solitariness she gradually detected energy. She appropriated a space with attenuated planar forms that she hung or layered in carefully devised installations, leaving enough room for the energy left over from some prior time to work. In this period, very sensitive for her, in which a great deal depended on intuition, the artist started to heighten the expressive aspects of the materials — the transparency of glass, the short life of plastic sheeting, the brittleness of mirrors, the commonness of plastic tubes. She gradually educated the viewers who moved in her exhibition fi elds with ease, not necessarily searching for a story, although it was felt there was one somewhere in the background. A bit later, she offered narratives in which it was possible to recognise both her and oneself. The stories are on the whole known to all and the contents are shared. In the video work The Witness (2011) Ksenija’s two eyes are the stages of actions that make their way through to us but partially. In each pupil is one scene — on the left, in a darkened space a man and a woman are standing. She is dressed; from a white chair, she takes clothing bit by bit, helping the man to dress. Her movements are protective, she helps him keep his balance until at the end they embrace and then go off, each one to his or her own side. In the Istinite priče second pupil, the same figures are standing opposite each other, undressed. This time the man stays bare, while helping his partner to dress. At the end, instead of a hug, he gets a slap. I look with some effort into Ksenija’s unblinking eyes, while in almost painful (media controlled) convulsion they watch a scene that contains the elements of everyday life, the mutual differences of which intrigue us. Is it possible to find out more? Why does getting dressed end with a slap; why are the relations between the fi gures unequal? Is their story personal, or is it a sample that symbolises common relationships? Looked at in the continuity of testing out and speaking about the man and woman relationship, The Witness is a continuation of her previous works, of out–of–focus internal views with which she endeavoured to represent what she saw. Or just imagined? The own–skin method, as astutely defi ned by Nada Beroš,1 is a constant in Ksenija’s creative strategy. It is the persevering membrane between worlds — external and internal, private and public body, which do not necessarily exist within a common semantic fi eld. Autobiography is anyway the product of different factors — of real experience mixed with what we have heard, seen, read, what we have been told and made up. Fact and fi ction are inextricably woven together.2 The Witness is part of the complex Ksenija relational space the borders of which are in motion. It is not easy to conclude the reason for this; experience somehow too patently intrudes itself as ideal explanation. In the exhibition context we can connect it with Looking (2000), a glass box placed next to a wall, in the lower surface of which two photographs are refl ected. One above the other, joined with an almost invisible transition at the line of the nose, there are two portraits of Ksenija, the upper with eyelids lowered, the lower with eyes wide open. While we look at them from in front, the direct gaze evades us; we can obtain this only after we peer towards the mirror from which, with uncommon precision and penetration, Ksenija’s eyes look at us. For Merleau–Ponty, sight is not a window into a ready–made world.3 One might rather say this is about resistance, about the thickness that must be overcome in order to arrive at — what? The personal experiential structure is used with an intention, but what is the purpose if we are deprived of narrative and context, among other things? The way in which we establish a relation with Ksenija’s works has never been unambiguous. It was necessary to look from the side for the body of her world to appear. After reception of the codes that she has sent us through the slightly opened door, her likeness would appear for a moment (Slow Motion, 2000) and the walls started to breathe with the rhythm of her inhalations (Light and Shadow, 2000). In the exhibition hall several hearts beat as one (True Stories, 2000), yet what did we actually gain by entering a space in which she mediates her own, and others’, experience? What she expected from us a few years ago — willingness to sharpen the sight so as to be able to distinguish something from a blurry image, is in the recent cycle reduced and simplifi ed. Thus Skin is reduced to three parts of the human body — cheek, palm and shoulder, behind the taut surface of which in the middle ground are seen the shadows and concavities of someone’s private topography. Touch me. My skin is not perfect, perhaps I have not tended it enough, have eaten too much sweet stuff, put on the wrong skin cream. But it is me, the way I am, while I pass through the multitude trying for someone to see, feel and touch me. Our personal archive is full of images and information that we do not need, at which we look, powerless to draw away the gaze. It is hard to determine the borders of reality outside of which the manipulated media space begins; on the computer monitors fl icker constantly new visual data, to which our attention is glued. It is impossible to separate what we see from what we believe, or what we are ready to take on trust. Where has the human skin vanished, perhaps imperfect in its appearance, yet capable of resisting the mendacious stimuli that form the tectonics of our quotidian? Is there beauty in the simplest possible scene of someone’s hand or cheek, of imperfect complexion, or did we long ago become dulled to the ordinary and the everyday, accustomed to the honed images (whose pixels, it is true, would so easily disperse if we just wanted it)? Digital art media have in the last few years led to the traditional concept of the image being increasingly considered as a processual model of art.4 And new concepts are being brought in — interaction, telematics and genetic image process — everything increasingly tending to a kind of fusion of perception that includes diverse human senses. Various artistic genres are implemented in the photographic image, everything together becoming part of the representation of the virtual space in which everything is possible, in which artifi cially created rules reign. A lot of this is used for the purpose of attaining illusions that are maximally convincing, and there is no wonder that in encounters with photographs we should have become circumspect, that we endeavour to understand whether the representation did once exist in some real space–time, or is everything that defi nes it the result of virtual reality and its codes. In the context of media history digital images have a different meaning from other representations, for in them “the differences between inside and outside,near and far, physical and virtual, biological and automatic, image and body are disappearing.”5 Immersion in such constructed structures, enabled, among other things, by the development of the media, puts us in the position of testing out the critical distance, the individual and collective competences that aid in the historicisation and interpretation of the material observed. Are we going to be able to incorporate the virtual, the computer–generated event into interpretative processes on which we have been at work for years, or will we be satis- fi ed with the new quality of pictures that succumbs to the incompetent eye? The question can be put differently: are we going to be satisfi ed with the quality of representation that works like the one–time, “imperfect” image whose role was not to succumb? It seems that we are on two sides of a passage, in which the metaphor of corridor does not facilitate solving the dilemma as to which side to enter, or to exit. One of the exits is “offered” in the scene of a digitally generated photograph Togetherness (2011). It was taken gradually, in different places in Zagreb, and unlike many similar scenes, was not taken from anonymous Internet sources. The faces on it seem familiar, but with more attentive observation, we will fi nd it hard to notice anyone we know. I would say that I was able to recognise just one person — a man in a blue overall; he is like a beggar who has for years now collected alms at the crossroads of Zagreb. Or was I mistaken? Why do I want to recognise someone? Is that a tribute we pay surrounded by the thousands of scenes that fl icker in our fi eld of vision? Would some positive identifi cation aid the understanding, or is just part of a game that has no winner? Media art, among other things, explores the aesthetic potentials of the interactive and processual image worlds.6 We might perhaps agree that this is an age of the culture of virtual images/representations that depends on the development of new interactive models, interfaces, where various activities, in principle innovative, take place. Images were once rare and individual, reserved for special places, and gradually through the fi ssures began to penetrate into many areas of everyday life. We are caught up in a matrix of images7 and “things that were formerly impossible to depict can now be represented; temporal and spatial parameters can be changed at will so that virtual spheres can be used as models or simulations for making specifi c types of experience”.8 What experience does Ksenija Turčić mediate with the photograph Togetherness? The urge for repetition I interpret as a component part of the analytical structure of observing, a search for an exception that we come upon with careful looking. “I see from only one point, but in my existence I am looked at fromall sides,”9 says Lacan. Do we become more aware of someone’s existence if the same likeness is multiply mediated by the photograph? However did she choose it, and how does she justify her choice? The simultaneous projection Where Are You Going (2011) is presented on the trapezoid bases of columns in the exhibition space of the Croatian Academy’s Glyptotheque. A simple narration reposes in the very structure of the work. We follow six female fi gures in various times of life, as they walk down a corridor, towards a door in the background of the scene that they will never reach. The rhythm corresponds to their age, from the running of a playful little girl to the slow walk of an old woman who uses a stick to help her. The projection is colourless, grey, devoid of the numerous layers of meaning that we would easily attribute to it if it were an ordinary video. But the somewhat unprepossessing surface draws the attention only with the occasional successive sample. How in today’s conditions of the extensive domination of brilliantly processed scenes can one interest the observer? In spite of the technological capacities that help in the creation of interactive imaginary worlds and depictions, Ksenija Turčić continues to be dedicated to themes the multiple sensitivity of which rests on personal experience. Her new, processed worlds are integrated into experience that we can recognise from before. The emphasis is on continuity, irrespective of her having at her disposal the new patterns of communication. Is the interpretation made more diffi cult thereby? Detached from the other pieces, the two–sided video projection Observing (2011) is a synchronised recording of obverse and reverse of various persons who pass in front of the camera, bending towards the lens. The position of the viewer is identifi ed with camera and camera person position and it seems as if we were coexisting in some world that only partially, in passing, integrates others’ views. As if we were placed behind a screen that could be that of the computer with which almost every day we establish some kind of relationship in our working space, while our bodies are slightly leaning forwards, ready to receive the information that comes in to our world. Instead of the look into the mirror, which she offered in some of her previous works, Ksenija Turčić resorts to the refl ecting image of the monitor or video projection surface thanks to which we are able to test out ourselves. To be honest, we are not interested in what happens to these people who in uneven rhythm alternate in the composition leaning forward to be able to see us better. More than anything else, we are interested in the reason why they are looking towards us, but the meanings evade us, blur and once again remain outside the focus. The narrative subject, the episode that it describes for us and at the end the whole of the work that unites it all are parts of Ksenija’s sequential archive in which we come across a combination of complex fi les and short notes. Unlike the aesthetic impression that was very important to her in previous spatial and video installations (Do ut des, The Garden, Sunt lacrimae rerum?, to mention just a few), the recent works are simplifi ed and in some way pared down. Reduced to grey, deprived of backgrounds and other references to a real context, they help in the determination of identity, the fi nding of a common rhythm to enable us at least briefl y to coexist in the exhibition space. Like the fi gures from True Stories, we share interpersonal experiences the content of which will remain concealed, defi ned only by the beating of the heart, while we are at once both close and distant. Briefly “unified” by the disturbing tone that recalls that all − the narrators, the stories and their actors — have their own shelf life.
Sandra Križić Roban
