Iva Korenčić / At the same time
Solo exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition SIMULTANEOUSLY is an artistic situation that arises as a reaction to the book of the same name created in 2019.
In the book, I thematize interpersonal relationships with people with whom I have been bound by emotional or other closeness during my life, translating them into an imaginary relationship that is structured into a dialogue with oneself through the aggregation of experiences.
By repeatedly turning this dialogue towards concrete and then abstract expression and thought, for me it ceases to be a dramatic replication but becomes a place of dealing with the internal conflict between the personal and social construction of femininity, gender identity as a binary opposition from which other binarisms arise, and a place of potential (or at least temporary) reconciliation of this conflict.
This interpersonal relationship becomes a methodology, a unique practice whose structural and functional features mirror the history of all these relationships – even those before them – the sediments of social heritage. Since 'dialogue' has taken the form of automatic writing, it has grown into a dream-fictional autobiographical work in which I deal with the experience of the linearity of time versus the experience of psychoanalytic, recursive time.
When structuring the book itself, I used as a reference, among other things, books in which the reader narratively chooses the turns of the plot – depending on which direction we want the story to go, we turn a certain page. I consider this possibility to make the flow of time unreliable, that the plot flows functionally or dysfunctionally – but takes place independently – and that the flow of the text itself is upgraded by leaps and bounds and fragments, close to the way the mind functions – unpredictable and non-linear, and yet with a very strong illusion of choice.
In the art exhibition, according to the same principle on which I treat and (re)organize the text, I structure and arrange materials and objects into sculptural and artistic situations. I create a space of leaps and bounds of memory, while exploring the similarities and differences and the possibilities of communicative reach of two media – text/book versus art and spatial installation.
I draw the idea for the materials from the references listed in the essays from the book, which are inorganic, but also organic materials, everyday objects, alluvium, textiles and traces of the experience of the body. Events, characters, relationships and memories become colors, materials, constructions, compounds, threads, objects, lines, shapes. I connect the complexity of the identity system with the mechanical, chemical and/or biological depletion of the materials from which the work is made.
Themes that rely on psychic mechanisms anchored in memory and being with the fragments of old versions of oneself are reflected in the practice of collecting, sorting and processing pieces of washed objects connected into an illusion of wholeness. On the other hand, I think of the fluid interweaving of personal memory, collective memory, psychopathology, cellular memory, fantasy and phantasm, and historical memory as an unbroken line – a thread that breaks into countless framed voids as part of the weave.
By associative mapping of memories, I correlate the experience of being in the physical setting of the character, i.e. the space of the installation, which relies on the properties and processes of the materials that make up the installation. I also try to form such an experience of three-dimensional space within the two-dimensional text of the book using footnotes ("hyperlinks") and associative jumps within the narrative of the book itself, in order to allow the story spatiality and depth.
Dealing with the concept of construction – a term that can be used in the context of sentence, but also spatial and prefabricated constructions, I consider an exhibition in which a completely new space is reconstructed – the space of memory – by actualizing the principle of recall.
Iva Korenčić
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Iva Korenčić is a multimedia artist. She studied contemporary dance at SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) in Salzburg and filmmaking at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, majoring in New Media. In her artistic practice, she explores the themes of identity and memory reflected in the materiality of traces with a focus on processuality, the transformative capacities of media and the development of new methodologies. Since 2009, she has been working as an author, director, cinematographer and photographer on a number of projects. She has exhibited at group and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Prozori Gallery, Academia Moderna, Lauba, ULUPUH Gallery, MUO, Pogon Jedinstvo, Kazamat Gallery, SC Gallery and many others.
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
You can see the exhibition during the working hours of the Gallery (Mon-Fri: 9-16, 18-20 h and Saturdays: 11-16 h) until 20.12.2022.
