press
Paperwork
DNEVNIK, Thursday, 03 January 2008, Ida HiršenfelderPaper cranes
The exhibition entitled Paper - Paperworks was curated by Barbara Novakovič Kolenc, known to us as the initiator of some of the more talked about curator projects (Greenaway, Continental Breakfast), and by Macedonian artist Jovan Balov, who also put on display the three central objects of the present exhibition. In the catalogue, the authors were given some paper space where they were able to note their thoughts on the exhibition, which is a welcome change in the curator practice.
Even though every artist has an entirely unique vision of this material, their interest could be summed up into two key moments. On the one hand, paper is a civilisation achievement enabling the spreading of knowledge and poetics; it appears st the exhibition as sculpture fine art material that in itself dictates a love of letters. On the other hand, the print media are, despite the vast number of others, still the major information bearers and creators of the public political opinion with which the authority systems manipulate.
The authors who are taking part belong to the middle generation whose creative life experience enables it to review the shift of the information bearer from paper to radio, television and finally the digital network, in which they occupied an applicable and at some point nostalgic standpoint towards the given material. Alen Ožbolt cuts out a poetic space in the blind letters, blind press, which emerges in the emptiness of the intermediate space. He exhibits the traditional letter bearer with a lot of love for the book, even though he uses the material in an entirely sculpturesque manner. The most commonplace symbol of "the heart" outlines a minimalistic intervention across the entire surface of the floor and talks about lost love.
Digestible paper by Simon Šemov represents national symbols that are outlined by the cuts of imprinted vegetables. He prepares us edible paper with a recipe to create national, religious symbols. Šemov thus creates a complete material demystification of paper which inspite of all the achievements of the civilisation is but a treated part of a plant. The work also has an entirely real side to it, pointing out the reals food for common people who cannot survive from enlightened symbols alone. Zoran Todorović set up a site specific installation made of newspapers entitled The Belgrade Altar, which is part of the wider project Speak Serbian So the Whole World Can Understand You. It therefore discusses the problematics of Serbian national identity. The central part of the altar is made up of who Belgrade magazines, the right-winged Nin and the left-winged Vreme, which were recontextualised by the artist with individual excerpts, with which he was able to find interesting, contradictory contents that shocks us with its politically incorrect character and sharpness.
Erasing the linear inscription of the contents of daily newspapers is also the occupation of Ismet Ramičević, who knits his info fabric out of threading rolls of newspaper material. He refers to the statement made by Baudrillard: "We live in a world with more information and less and less meaning." Aleksandra Vajd in her series Dedication, on the other hand, strayed far from the primary material. She deals with paper merely in an indirect way. She enlarged excerpts of intimate dedications to be found on the first pages of books into a wallpaper of several metres in the vitrine of the Vžigalica gallery and along the atrium of the Ljubljana City Museum. Unfortunately, the works of the last two authors are not included into the gallery space, even though we should welcome the installation that provided, for example, sufficient space for Ožbolt to set up a poetic paper installation. What goes to the detriment of the works is by no means the bad installation but rather a bad marking of the works in the museum. This has not happened for the first time, either. With the establishment of the new gallery, the museum has the ideal opportunity to form a very qualified and harmonised exhibition programme, which is also proven by the exhibition Paper, even though it is not entirely clear what the establishment means by wanting to establish a laboratory of urban structure.
VECER, Tuesday, 4 March 2008, Helena Pivec
Paper Is not Paper
Upon the Exhibition Paper-paperwork in the Vžigalica Gallery and in the Atrium of the Ljubljana City Museum, produced by the Muzeum Institute The title of the exhibition alone, as well as each separate work seem like a dedication to the absent. Paper is the act which hereby contains each one of the three meanings: it is a bare body, a document, but at the same time an act (gesture). The exhibition Paper-paperwork thus evades classic fine art usage of paper (which is materialized in the form of exhibitions of "works on paper" or sculptures from paper pulp) as well as a thematization of the English word paperwork (office work with papers, in which the growing bureaucracy is already adopting the digital carrier). On the exhibition, the viewer/reader was not drawn into the image or the text: he is faced by paper. And into the "paper" itself, absence is written - today's paper has nothing to do with papyrus, a water plant from which paper was manufactured in ancient Egypt. Love letter. ""To think about you" (...) In itself, this thought is empty: I do not think you; I simply give you back (in as much as I forget you). I name this form (this rhythm) "thought": I have nothing to say to you, except to say this nothing to you: "Why do I return to writing again? Darling, you must not ask such clear questions, for in truth I have nothing to tell you; however, your dear hands will nevertheless hold this peace of paper"." (Barthes/Freud/Goethe). Alen Ožbolt composes a floor installation out of a couple of dozen open letters with "cut out" hearts (the cliché symbol is the letter, which here simply manifests its original meaning of "cutting"): two by two in regular intervals, then halves on the margin, which require the next letter, its mirror image or double, to fill up the form and continue the monological pattern. Before us lies a rug, like a garden which has actually flown (through the public system of mail, folded and closed).
The notions of antique rhetoric and mnemonics are topographical - locus, sedes, topos -, for they stand for space, surfaces, backgrounds, where images are being written like letters on paper. The copy of a book page with a dedication, which is enlarged and glued to the wall like wallpaper, the new work by Aleksandra Vajd, emphasizes the corporality of the book in a wide set flat manner. The book has its margins, but structurally opens into the continuum. The coded emptiness of the dedication page simply and momentarily (like an eyelid) stops the space of the book, sets a look but immediately opens to another place: "as if to create a space for the portrait we see when the emotion of giving is triggered. Some kind of a push off before entering the story itself, a preceremonial awakening of the space," - as the curator of the exhibition Barbara Novakovič Kolenc wrote in the catalogue. The name, which otherwise has the privileged position (tattoos) is actually escaping us all the time. The programmed attention of the viewer is being stolen by the palimpsest letters shining through from the next, covered page.
Simon Šemov, the master of manual paper manufacturing ("out of Cattail, Linen, Alga, Fig, Mulberry,Cotton , Bladder senna, Dwarf elderberry, Japanese mulberry, Hellebore, Yellow gentian, Stinging nettle ..."), the author of the book Medium Cellulosi, switches the permanence of paper, since this time the bearer is transformed into food, seasoning this gesture by setting up the cellulose fibers of vegetables and fruit in a paper sheet into flag symbols such as the cross, the star of David, the swastika, the sun, saying: "in the background of very serious historical symbols lies real food for regular people and food as the true reason for making war."
Schiller's quotation "Hunger and love keep the world spinning around" is, in addition to the quotation from Freud's Conflict and Culture on the false human standards and the wish for power, success and wealth, is built into the stratified collage of printed media covering the whole wall. The artist Zoran Todović covers the central part of his Belgrade Altar with "icons" from the front pages of weekly publications NIN and Danas (windows cut out by scalpel enable an insight into the fragments of the text or the pictures inside), while fastening cut out and glued local daily newspapers on the margins, cut into little cubes, and painting it into a light and dark colored wing. The ancient Greeks supposedly did not know the word "to read", also the Latin verb "lego" means "to collect", which evokes a process of memory. Jovan Balov (the co-curator of the exhibition, multimedia artist, publicist and galerist between Skopje and Berlin) has been collecting materials on the identity of Tito and making them face his childhood memories. "Transcript Tito" is a threefold act: next to a gigantic silhouette of a head, which resembles a great, shaped stain of printing ink to which media scraps are glued, are placed the photographical portraits from the collection of the Ljubljana City Museum ? commemorative narrative images for the middle generation and mere museum artifacts for the younger ones.
Ismet Ramičević folds the verboseness and multiple images of newspaper into ribbon-like scrolls, which he then threads into spirals, setting them in frames after pressing the airtight and placing them on the floor. The artist, who was also a technical editor of a daily newspaper, knows the nature of the bearer of decanting signs through and through - in the gallery, he challenges the viewer/reader to walk across the work of art, the flexible rug made up of media.
KULTURNI ODMEVI, RTV SLO, 3rd programme,5 January 2008, Petra Tanko
An international exhibition dubbed Paper - Paperwork is on display since 15 December in the Vžigalica gallery, the gallery of the Ljubljana City Museum. It showcases artists who see and use paper as bare material and others who integrate paper as material with the power of information, thus offering it for second, new reading.
FEMALE READER: In the catalogue to the exhibition Paper - Paperwork, the curator Barbara Novakovič Kolenc wrote: The inscription is usually placed on the white paper surface. The surface cannot be infinite, man has moderated it according to his own perception, his sense of sight and his own hand. Paper is able to replace many different materials. In the process, it loses its primary function of the inscription bearer. We are interested in bare paper, in places where it becomes missing as the information bearer or where it is present within the scope of its lifespan.
MALE READER: The exhibition Paper - Paperwork has been prepared by the institution Muzeum Ljubljana, with cooperation between curator Barbara Novakovič Kolenc and Macedonian artist and galerist Jovan Balov. The display features one or several works by Macedonian artists Simon Šemov, Ismet Ramičević, Jovan Balov, Serbian artist Zoran Todović and Alen Ožbolt and Aleksandra Vajd, Slovenian fine artists.
FEMALE READER: The exhibition Paper - Paperwork is inscribed in the sense of the Ljubljana City Museum, within the framework of which the Vžigalica gallery is operating, as a museum artefact, as a bearer of knowledge, tradition and culture; for it has been an important source of historic study and new interpretations from even before the graphic machine and press were invented and especially since then. On the other hand, a possibility of transcribing the material into a work of art is presented here.
MALE READER: The authors are handing over to each other the communication with the medium of paper as such with a diverse and unique approach. Alen Ožbolt, who understands his work in a clearly intimate, subtle way and entirely unconcerned by everyday information, approached paper as material that can contain its information in a different manner than mere press. He writes his text with scissors. The author cuts out symbols in precise geometric intervals, creating a structure of an open letter in space. With the simple gesture of perforation, the paper lace is transformed into a letter. A pattern of cut out time is formed - of paper hearts, with the contrasts of convex and concave forms being replaced by the repeating silhouettes of empty spaces in the enlargement. The author also thematises the dimension of the floor which appears in fine arts already since the sixties onwards, while in our space, it was already researched by Ožbolt in the preceding decade within the framework of the project V.S.S.D.
FEMALE READER: A special approach to the medium and especially the material itself is enacted by Simon Šemov. He is also a professor and head of the Chair for paper at the Skopje Academy of Fine Arts. He has spent several decades focusing his research on manual paper fabrication and has also passed his tradition on to his students. Šemov says anecdotically that it all began with the picking of mountain herbs for teas. He has developed his work in the direction of studying cellulose, which is contained in individual plants in domestic environment, so that it would not be necessary to import cellulose from the far east countries for manual paper fabrication, which would significantly reduce the costs of the procedure. Research of this sort is presented in the manually manufactured book Medium cellulosi. The second work showcased by Simon Šemov bears the title Macedonian Sun, featuring witty transformations of the paper medium:
MALE READER(translation): One of my themes is edible paper. From a technical aspect, the paper in question is made from fruit and vegetables, the most common things in life, which are eaten. They are formed in the shape of signs, symbols of religions, ideologies; the five-armed star, swastika, the star of David and so on and so forth. It is like a little wittiness, to eat a whole religion or a whole ideology; I suppose that people put their stomach first before ideology. In this respect, the message is such: first comes existence and then all the things that are able to indoctrinate man, to impose an ideology, mysticism, religion and so on.
MALE READER: A special approach to the understanding of paper was chosen by Slovenian author Aleksandra Vajd. Her work bears the title Page - Dedication. It differs from her work so far, using mostly photography as a medium of expression. This time, she took on the position of the one who does not produce new objects, but rather choses and recycles that which already exists. The author writes in the catalogue:
FEMALE READER: I have always realised the usually characteristics of a book: the design of its front page, the type of paper used, the expressive image of the typing on the page ... Lately, I have started to collect the pages that are part of the book, where the author writes his dedication to someone ... in a while I realised that this short note has a lot in common with the moment in reality and that it is as temporary as a composition, a moment, a situation on a photograph ... short, tiny, secret notes were treated as dedications of the book or as the first connection, an introduction to go along ... anyway, I was not interested in who is behind the first letters or the names ? those pages took on the position of the image with its simplicity and modest length ... in some cases, the result is as much connected to poetry as it is to art ... the wittiness of this work lies in the unveiling of the way in which the dedications, which are seen separately, begin to live lives of their own ...
MALE READER: The complexity of different opinion regarding paper is also supplemented by Macedonian artist and professor Ismet Ramičević, who offers the viewer a new space of movement in his work Infofabric.
MALE READER (translation):
For a long time, I worked in the newspaper publishing house Nova Makedonija, I was the technical editor of daily newspapers. There was where it all began, in the year 1998. I have also created a multimedia project Labirinth. This works also originated from the mentioned project, through Labirinth 1, 2, 3. The work that I exhibit here bears the title Infofabric. The fabric the material of which consists of news, journalist photographies and texts. Before Yugoslavia fell apart, there was great informational tension. I could not restrain myself and not respond with my word, my reflection on the situation. In the work Labirinth, these was a number of texts, photographs, halls; that was a space made inside a hallway, because I was experiencing the world inside the Yugoslavian space as such as I have set up. Realising the power, the force of this medium. This was how it all began. However, this work, Infofabric, is unconcerned with all the information, because the entire information is transformed in an artistic act; where the text becomes unreadable, where the photograph cannot be seen and the optics is transferred to a purely fine arts situation. This is my work. The visitor in a gallery can experience it visually, but can also experience it physically: because he can walk around my work, he can wade through it. This is a new moment for me, but, so it seems, also for the visitors. Because a lot of visitors are afraid to walk upon a work of art, however, I want them to. It is that kind of material. Nevertheless, it does contain some thread of information. It is that social aspect in my work, without any politics. I am not politically engaged in my artistic creation. If a visitor walks over a work of art, he does not feel sure; it is something else to walk across an everyday surface, the visitor is afraid to thread upon a work of art, not realising that he is walking upon information.
FEMALE READER: The co-participant and also co-author of the exhibition Paper - Paperwork is Jovan Balov. The Macedonian faine arts and multimedia artist operates on the distance Skopje - Berlin, where he is head of the gallery Prima Center. At the Ljubljana exhibition, he presents three of his works that requestion the knowledge on the greatest personality of our common history, Tito. Therefore, who is Tito:
MALE READER (translation):
I too would very much like to know who Tito is. The work I have made for this exhibition in Ljubljana sets the question of who Tito was. Taking into account that my analysis of the preparation for this work was very serious, I have tries to gather the material that speaks about the identity of this man who governed a country in which I was also born myself. I have found over thirty theories about his personality, all of them very interesting, controversial. According to the opinion of general Rotić, for example, Tito was supposed to be a woman, a transvestite, furthermore, Tito was supposed to be the child of hidden love between an Austrian count and his mother; on the internet, I also found articles saying that Tito was replaced three times, that he was first replaced in Paris after the congress of the communist pary in Barcelona, that he was replaced for the second time after the offensive in Užice and that he was replace for the third time in Drvar. I am not a historian and the objective of my work is not to touch upon historic facts. I am merely an artist that tried to set the question in his work, a new question, in order to requestion his own personal childhood and try to understand why the things that should have happened did not. I accidentally have three works in this concept, I did not even plan to have three works. In the studio, I made this collage after the photograph of Tito from the year 1946; I have worked very seriously on the videowork Transcript Tito. It is composed of three segments: the first is recorded in the studio, the second is a documentary video on Tito - how he shaves his beard in a luxury environment; the third part of the video is recorded on Tito's grave at the Flowers House: on his grave, I tore the newspapers and thus, in a symbolic way, I tore my past. It was very interesting for me to remember the 1980s, when I first visited Tito's grave, for I graduated from college in the same year. We were prohibited to celebrate our graduation night, instead, they sent us to Tito's grave. It occurred to me how my life would have changed had I tore the newspapers on Tito's grave then, in 1980. So this was a very innocent and very symbolic action that I did in 2007 and would be impossible to carry through in the 1980s. This is how much things have changed. Although, some emotions, memories remain that one can analyse. I was planning on putting on display two works. At the Ljubljana City Museum, I took a look at the permanent exhibition and discovered the part that touches upon the socialist period in Slovenia, where I found some very interesting Tito's photographs that I absolutely wanted to include in my installation. I thank the museum for understanding and for the quick reaction of lending me those photographs. Thus they momentarily switched space, they are not in the permanent museum installation, but within the framework of the exhibition Paper - Paperwork.
FEMALE READER: Jovan Balov is also the co-author of this exhibition that somehow unites the artists of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. A political engagement is also present in the works od some artists. What is Balov's view of the whole and the historic moment defined by the exhibition Paper - Peperwork:
MALE READER (translation)
This October, I coincidentally flew to Belgrade and there I was coincidentally met by Zoran Todović, who coincidentally took me to his studio and the same moment that I saw his works, I knew that he must also be part of this exhibition in Ljubljana that will interconnect all other segments. In its widest sense, the exhibition is not designed as a political, as an engaged display, but I myself am perhaps an artist that tries to carry the burden of the present time. And who is inspired by this burden in his artistic actions. I knew that it would be very dangerous for me to be the only engaged person in this exhibition, to set the questions related to history, and I am therefore thrilled that we managed to integrate the works of Zoran Tadić in time.
FEMALE READER: Serbian artist and professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Novi Sad, Zoran Todović, represents the work The Belgrade Altar. The author dubbes his technique stratified collaging, the material is daily and weekly newspaper. Taking into account the place of appearance, the work is different according to the contents that are offered by the media of different cities, countries, the shape does not shift. It is about piling up old newspapers, in which it is either important or unimportant what is written, it is important or unimportant what the pictures confer;
MALE READER: (translation)
The central part is occupied by the front pages of the Belgrade weeklies on which I made minimal interventions with the scalpel in order to open windows in the front pages through which some other titles would appear along with some other pictures that give a new dimension together with the rest of the real titles. There is some sarcasm in this work, some critique, ridicule, also some sad elements. It will be a big composition, it bears the title The Belgrade Altar. While the title suggests a religious item, it is more a question of who the people pray to every day; however, the daily and weekly also pray to the press, read newspapers, believe or do not believe what they are being told, believe or do not believe in the pictures they look at. In all these years, a series of similar installations could also be set up in different places, but given that I nevertheless live in Belgrade and am exposed to the pressures of the press every day, I started to make windows in the most well-known Belgrade weeklies, such as Nin and Vreme, which actually represent two poles of everyday speech by the Belgrade or Serbian press. The central part will be framed by a composition of the local press, which will not be as explicit as the central one. The left side is white, while the right one is black, dark, which I will achieve with minimal use of colour. I wish that between the white and the black, light and dark, lightness and darkness, we could show the everyday events by reading between the lines.
