20 May 2014

The Horse // Bull - Raven : Audio works for exhibition The Chain by Simonida Rajčević




Chain _irons_ .....

From dynamic works filled with gestures and quotes which, whether they compel us to stamp on the pictures or prepare a stand, suck the viewer into the urban world of intense experience, Simonida Rajcevic, with the exhibition Lanac (Chain), makes an excursion into a new artistic experiment.

The world of immobile animals, made to perfection in modeled and processed forms, imposes distance. It compels us to move away and think, and even lash out, making our reception move in the opposite direction to the normal process of the artist. The Chain exhibition has no gestures of random motifs. It establishes cold control over its symbols, form and means of expression.

The whole concept of the exhibition testifies that this is about the need to establish control over our own experience, about the subtle inner game of the artist within the framework of which various artistic principles struggle for supremacy. At the very entrance to the gallery, we are faced with the mastered power of a bull. Lust, passion, pain, power, conflict, and struggle are tamed in the computer algorithm of CNC machines for precision molding forms. The bull is sacrificed. The volume of the body is highlighted, coated with a coating of high black gloss, skewered, but with almost grotesque dignity, as though surrendering without a fight rose it to a mythical symbol whose only purpose is to bear witness to the conquered beauty and power of another world.

And there, at the border of our world and hers, the world of the viewer and the artist stands a flock of identical ravens. Precisely programmed to ideal proportions, and then serially replicated, the raven introduces us to a world of Baudrillar's domain of hyperreality. And right there on the bird, like a messenger of the death of the real bird, play digital images of Bambi and Snoopy's companion, the little bird called Woodstock.

When Jannis Kounellis, one of the prominent representatives of the Arte Povera movement, strapped 12 live horses to the walls of a gallery in Rome in 1969, it was a radical act of redefining the notion of the object of art that forms the assumption of intuition. So although our artist, at the very end of the exhibition, faces the perfect form of the mythical Arion, her artistic process is stubbornly instinctive. With suggestive symbolic sculptures, seductive digital interventions and specially composed sound, Manje Ristic deliberately directs the instincts of the viewer and provokes a conflict between reality and hyper-reality, animal and human, live and inanimate, and history and myth. Even when using a mimetic process of the work of a machine, when formally investigating contemporary digital phenomena, when the viewer does not pull in her own image but pushes it into herself, Simonida Rajcevic, remains true to her artistic temperament. With her own resources, reduced forms but also the actual content of the exhibition, she provides a unique and totally authentic contribution to the consideration of topics that launch festivals like Resonate.

By Milica Pekić

Translation by Mark Pullen