Vlatko Vincek

ANTI

November 18 – November 27, 2014

Opening of the exhibition on 18th of November at 7:30 pm

 

That evoking of the one who is no more, the one who does not exist as a living being, except in memory, is the topic of Vincek’s work Anti from 2011/12, exhibited in the Home of HDLU (Croatian Association of Artists) as a two-channel video installation accompanied by a series of photographs.     

Each video installation shows the same motif: walking around the cemetery. Camera circles around the graves in the rhythm of the author’s pace, documenting the existing condition in one take.  Looking at the black and white image, one can hear the sound of shoes stepping on gravel and leaves, birds singing, and here and there an occasional caw; everything is wrapped in serenity characteristic of cemeteries. One is children’s cemetery (Brežice) and the other is pet cemetery (Rijeka). While the video is made almost as a side note of a cemetery with the main function to mark and transmit the experience and atmosphere, the photographs are frozen, singled out moments that function as enlarged details of the encounter with the graves of children and animals one has experienced.   

Vincek compares the memory of the body and the memory of relationships – to his own and other species. By simultaneously displaying cemeteries, Vincek completely managed to convince us that the sadness and grief for the one with whom a long-term and deeper relationship has been established, the one we loved, be it a child or an animal, are very intense and shocking. Exposure to deadness, to being dead through memorial places, is the same in case of people and animals.   

The need for remembrance, to have a place functioning as a reminder, exists in both cases.

Headstone as a memory is one of the ways to inscribe and regulate the relation and keep the memory of someone in such a way to bring peace to the living. The serenity of cemeteries is related to that need, as the projection of inner efforts. In the work Anti, Vincek introduces pain, grief, memory and serenity as the fundamental processes related to the deceased, whether they are, in Singer’s terminology, human or nonhuman animals.     

From the foreword of Sunčica Ostoić

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic Croatia.

 

Bačva Gallery

Croatian Association of Fine Artists

Trg žrtava fašizma 16, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia 

 

 

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