GuestRoomMaribor2013

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Miljana Istijanović (ME)

Time is leaving its traces in things made by men, when they leave. In the same way, almost unnoticeably but still perceiving the artist intervenes in rooms of an abandoned house and in the inner shell, the walls, partly settling with a layer of relief drawing record. The artist transferred the textures of decaying walls inside the abandoned house in a sophisticated barely noticeable way into associative, fleeting memories of spreading spatial curtains. Gradually removing layers of wall paint, wallpapers with extreme reduction of art resources she created her own wall drawing. Female figures, a bed, a small dear, a chest of drawers with a mirror, a crucifix, are images that in individual’s perceptions open up as silhouettes of time’s uncertainty. Author’s reliefs look like they were there for a long time, they seem as prints of previous residents, as traces that appear but will soon vanish. Yet the artist colonized the place with her own intimate experience. With a space drawing in concrete residential environment that does not function as a residential place anymore, the artist created a place of reflection, a role of the memory and imaginary. What presents a women’s room, if we, together with Virginia Wolf, question the need for our own room and disregard its material occurrence? The artist’s minimal intervention in the existing situation of the location triggers the experience of discomfort. It brings out the thought of the place that is with intimate intervention brought back into the function of residence and at the same time intensively expands bare emptiness and reminds us of transience and eternal process of changing.

Text: Petra Kapš