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A Place of... is a painting and sound installation consisting of a series of seven
paintings and an audio registration. The work has its starting point in a visit I made
to the apartment of one of my family members, which was unfurnished and reduced to
essential, looking like an office-home unit almost void of the intimate, despite the
fact this person had been living there for many years. I asked him to
photographically “document” his flat and to auto-register his thoughts on several
my questions on the topic, with an intention to create a sort of interwoven “portrait” between
his living-space and his interior agents, desires and everyday life dynamic.
All the paintings represent fragmented views of an interior. They combine a
realist, documentation-like style with a photographic collage, which appears in a
form of minimal insertions, mostly of photographic images of architectures and landscapes
found on the Internet, and depicting either places from personal memory or images
generally familiar, belonging to our “mediatic” memory. These collages are symbolical
and evasive moments which take off the viewer’s experience from the tautological
features of the depicted space. Analogously, the same representations of interior
are intersected by different depictions - as paintings-inside-paintings - showing
from idyllic urban skylines, to visions of a bombed city, a stormed landscape, or a
burned building.
The painting series is accompanied by an audio registration to be listened via
portable MP3 player and headphones while watching the paintings and walking
through the exposition space. The audio, which is analogously divided in seven
brief stories, presents a sort of interior monologue narrated by a middle-aged men
voice, in English with a foreign accent. As it tries to converge the viewer’s attention
to the point of departure – the apartment itself, its narrative content directions the
work’s general thematic to a broader set of ideas. By analyzing his relationship with
his flat, the reasons for its emptiness and its highly functional logic, and his
emotional disattachment from it, the man confines his views of what “home” might
mean and how one’s sense of belonging and displacement gets externalized through
the way one deals with proper living space.
Presented in the occasion of the solo show at Osart Gallery, Milan (Italy). A Place
of… installation searches a dialogue with the gallery space itself and the specificity
of its interior furnishing. It is conceived to incorporate formally the gallery’s
architectural elements into the painted environment, while reflecting the temporariness
and indeterminateness of expositional space into the ambivalent character of depicted
flat and the narrator’s state of mind.
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A Place of...
2010
painting + sound installation
series of 7 paintings
(acrylic and collage on canvas, various dimensions);
audio registration (in 7 parts, 10:24 min)
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Iva Kontic