Iva Kontic

A Place of... takes its starting point from a visit to the apartment of a family member who had immigrated to America. Unfurnished and reduced to the essentials, his flat resembled an office-home unit, almost devoid of intimacy, despite the fact that he had been living there for many years. Intrigued, I asked him to photographically document the flat and to record his thoughts about the apartment and his relationship to it.

Made of a series of seven paintings and an audio recording, A Place of... tries to create an interwoven “portrait” of the living space and the interior forces, desires, and motivations that shape everyday individual life.

Displaying fragmented views of the apartment’s interior, the series of paintings combine a realist, documentary-like style with photographic collage, which appears in the form of minimal insertions. Mainly images of architecture and landscapes found on the Internet, the photographs depict places connected to personal memory yet also generally familiar, as they belong to our “mediatic” memory. Similarly, the interiors are intersected by different depictions, presented as paintings-within-paintings, ranging from idyllic urban skylines to visions of bombed cities, stormy landscapes, and burning buildings. These insertions introduce symbolic and elusive moments that shift the viewer’s experience away from the tautological features of the depicted space.

The painting series is accompanied by an audio recording to be listened to via headphones while viewing the paintings and walking through the exhibition space. Divided into seven brief stories, the audio presents an interior monologue narrated by a middle-aged man in English with a foreign accent. While directing the viewer’s attention back to the point of departure—the apartment itself—the narrative opens the work’s subject to a broader set of ideas. By describing his attitude toward the flat, the reasons for its emptiness and highly functional logic, as well as his emotional detachment from it, the man reflects on what “home” might mean and how one’s sense of belonging and displacement becomes externalized through the way one inhabits and relates to one’s living space.