Stones off shoulders, 2013
Jovana Popic – TAKE A PLACE
22 January 2014 – 21 February 2014
I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we`re all connected off in some very abstract land. David Lynch
The works of young multimedia artist Jovana Popić are circulating about questions of searching for traces, about the manifestation of identity. Traces of place, memory, of ideas and of time – Traces of a life story shaped by people, culture are condensed for a moment or for a certain time.
The often awarded Serbian-Croatian artist makes energy of a place visible. She describes her work as heterotopias, that Michel Foucault sees as: „real places, places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia… places outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality”.
Extremely impressive in her installations is the controversial match of material space and fleeting works. These include drawings, reliefs, objects from partly phosphorescent polyester, sculptures, video and sound installations. In 2012 she translated her artistic work into a Performative installation for 6 voices for the Choregie Festival in Maribor. In the operatic production, she reflects an experiential space through identity formation through music, film and theater on the basis of the interpretation by representatives of two following generations.
In her exhibition, she raises questions like: can we associate ourselves with certain places? Does this association constitute a vital source of both individual and cultural identity and security? Can a certain place be a point of departure from which we orient ourselves to the world? Or, did we become universal contemporary nomads, who spend their lives in the movement, between the places, whereby the experience of movement is more important than the experience of the place itself?
If places are not relational or historical or they are not concerned with identity such as airports, crossroads, and supermarkets, they are called “non-places”. They are the real factors of our existence. In her work titled „Take a Place” Jovana Popić invites us to reconsider our intimate personal navigation through the world we live in. She disputes that places are still important and profound centers of human experience, and that the conscious experience of movement is also deeply connected with them.
The large-scale spatial installation, Heterotopia, consisting of plaster reliefs, contemporary orientation marks and sound, opposes a place with a non-place. It makes the tension visible between the thoughts concerned with the universal and thoughts concerned with the territoriality, which is a manifest on the world scale today.
For the determination of identity through concrete experiential traces, Jovana includes methods of archeology, anthropology and sociology in her art. She refers to existential questions of human existence, on transience and phenomena of socialization. Subjective as associative access to her installations serve her research of environment, in which the recipient is involved, because „only through the reconstruction of a sense of connection, which refer to the traces, the actual artwork is constituted.“ (Christian Boltanski)
Jovana Popic (*1977, CRO-RS) got the grant of the United Kingdom of Norway and thereafter studied from 1999 till 2003 at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade with the Serbian State Scholarship for Science and Art Talents. Furthermore, she got the Friedrich Naumann Foundation´s grant for gifted people in 2006. In 2003 she has been represented at the 50. Venice Biennale already during her studies. In 2008 Jovana Popic received the Award of Ulrich and Burga Knispel Foundation. After further studies at the University of Arts in Berlin, Popic finished her degree as a master student in the class of Rebecca Horn and was awarded with the president´s prize of the University of Arts Berlin. Also in 2009 she got the scholarship of the Goethe Institute and went to Novosibirsk, which was followed by a grant (“Medea Electronique-Mixmedia Lab Residencies”) in Athens and Sellasia, Greece. Between 2010 and 2012 she got the grant of the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft e.V. Berlin.
The multimedia artist Jovana Popic followed invitations to exhibit her work throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, USA, Japan, Russia, Serbia and Croatia.
Kindly supported by Gigant Print Works.
Information about the artist
www.jovanapopic.com
