Barrel Gallery

Trg žrtava fašizma bb

Andrea Crnković and Nadija Mustapić: Different Beginnings

21 January - 8 February 2009

The process and the aftermath of life-scale decision making, the brief charismatic charge and its long-term relativity, take a significant place in the repertoire of themes, which engage human imagination and creative energy. Those are the moments when the course of life undergoes a huge leap, when the accelerated processes of deconstruction and construction get intertwined while creating a new „me“, who in spite of a changed context, in the end does not differ from that initial sense of self. Nevertheless…

This three-channel video installation by Andrea Crnković and Nadija Mustapić represents a multimedia contribution to the interpretation of the theme of new life-scale beginnings. The installation consists of three simultaneous and intertwined projections in forms of diptychs, in which performed scenes are being represented, animated and consolidated into a uniform sound recital, which forms an audio background. The installation is activated within the spatial disposition of the projections forming a triangular shape, which is being immersed in the dark projection space laden by the tenebrous female voice who is pronouncing cryptic descriptions of sublimated experiences. Depending on personal choices, the viewer is allowed several angles to experience the installation: to walk around its perimeter having constant views of one of the projections, or the possibility to expose themselves to its simultaneous endless flow standing in the very centre.

The performed part of the video occurs in a black non-space of the digital interface positioned at the left side of the diptych, the side of the heart and the instinct. Selectively erased parts of the taken footage in the inherently chosen digital media produce the images that show the choreographed feet movement in search for its path in the labyrinth of old bricks, the hands which are constructing and deconstructing a brick-made structure and a palm of the hand on whose lines a small sphere seems to be travelling. While explaining the dynamics of personal faith, those visual segments inform us of the importance of stubbornness, derailment from deep-seated rules, and of insight into the personal faith – conditioned by larger and given frameworks within which the existence is being mapped. The right-hand sides of the diptychs show external factors that operate from the other side of the personal choices and reference the regulative modes, which often times instruct contradictory inputs, the obligatory restrictions defined by the context and the fatalistic visions of transiency, as shown in the images of evaporating words. Each interpretation of the images in „Different Beginnings“ will probably trigger different nuances of meaning from the ones offered here, but the repertoire of applied symbols is clear enough not to leave us with any doubts about the end meaning.

Even though the inspiration was instilled in personal life experiences of the two authors – both have received education and lived abroad before returning to their home town – its realization is far removed from the linear narration of specific lived situations and events, and is geared towards a detection of more general, symbolic aspects of existence in the psychological gap marked by the experience of having changed a city or a country or entire value systems of living and working. The visual and atmospheric conviction constitute the strength of the „Different Beginnings“ and of the measures of intensity by which the authors experience their process of return. Contrary to today’s acquired documentary discourse often times used to elaborate fields of personal experience in the contemporary media, these two authors consciously use a seldom utilized art form in Croatia - video poetry – in which visual elements and potentials of multimedia, through different levels and different combinations of representations, elaborate a text and/or a story, which is a delivered as an audio backdrop and an integral part of the installation. As it is always the case with good poetry, „Different Beginnings“ employs a fluent rhythm to create resonance between otherwise unrelated scenes by constructing layers of meaning which are left open for individual interpretation and judgement. The ambition of expressing emotions, thoughts and psychological states of the authors without employing linear narration about a specific social cause for this piece, makes this show an unexpected and welcome diversion in the recent Croatian video production. The marker of focus has shifted from a didactic, often politicized discourse of contextualizing artistic production, onto more complex and undetermined domains of lyric presentation of subjective experience, which does not pretend to change the world, but for a change, wants to establish an emotional relationship with the public.

Branko Franceschi