Ivana Franke, Damir Očko, Silvio Vujičić: Izbjegavanje / Avoid
Exhibition catalogue. Edited by Jasna Jakšić
Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 2005.
Ivana Franke, Silvio Vujičić and Damir Očko are not an art collective: they are a group of artists whose previous works and explorations showed us similar, but at the same time complementary interests. The nature of perception, the level of discernibility, the relations between the observation level and the art object, surface invisibility and frequent playing with tautologisms belong to their common sphere. That is why Vujičić has recently issued a series of prints called Ne(vidljivi) rad (In(visible) Work), at the exhibition in the SC Gallery in 2003, Očko announced radio frequencies that could not be heard and the exploration of space by geometric constructions made of invisible threads by Ivana Franke often speaks the language of apparently empty space... Avoidance as a denominator of the whole exhibition starts from the description of the exhibition results. The search for common aspects frequently took the form of a negative selection, far from simple spontaneous expressions of ideas. The result is a somewhat ascetic, reduced exhibition form, from which really nothing can be deduced, but to which also nothing can be added.
Every supplement would fill at least one of the three empty rooms in the middle and scare away the “ghosts” who had been given this space for temporary usage. Avoidance is the search for the point break, that which is on the other side of the viewpoint. The English word avoid is a mild imperative, but when it is divided into a void, there is emptiness in the middle after the indefinite article.
Each of the four “parts” is actually a vision, spirit, casting off a solid, tangible form. It might partly be said that the object of the exhibition is perception, or rather perception traps and the change of the observer’s position. The public, but also the artists, are inside the work and receive the information from some other level, where the unknown, supernatural and parascientific meet, in the realm of contingency programmed by the Heaven.
From text by Jasna Jaksic
Croatian / English
14.8 x 21 cm, 36 pages.
Published by Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 2005.