Moroso Award for Contemporary Art 2011/12
Dragana Sapanjoš puts her art to work using tools and techniques that she masters both as theoretical solutions and with great manual skill, which allows her to make work of great precision without the slightest flaw. Hers is a way of investigating relationships between people, between things and people, between spaces and people, and for this reason the viewer – a conquest of the twentieth century – is always placed by the artist at the centre of the work and invited in various ways to take part. Thus, taking into account a path that runs from Benjamin to the internet, the artist seems to pursue the meaning of art for the author as transformed by the relationship between ancient, modern and postmodern media. It is an action on the subject, whose identity is put to the test, as are his senses, both bodily and psychic, both private and public, which appear different each time and for each person, even when they seem to repeat themselves unchanged over time. For this she uses disturbing techniques and practices, sometimes technical, sometimes sonic, sometimes due to repetition, at other times to intensity. In this regard we hear the artist say: “My research focuses on the relationship between content and container, on the perceptual alteration that the work produces in the consumer. The work presents itself as a space emptied of its object connotations, where the user, entering with his presence, activates the dimension of discourse. A discourse, and discourses, that feed on their own sensations, their own smell, their own presence, their own psyche and their own body, active elements that continually reshape the work itself. This is why I relate to space in a way similar to that of the viewer.”
This insistent working around and with the figure of the viewer, as said above, makes her research one of the most advanced, since it is centred on a crucial point of the research of the last century and of this one; indeed, by questioning who makes the work and who gives the work its meaning, she creates works that are so many attempts to answer the crucial questions of this new century about who makes art and what art is for. These questions also run through the works of her recent exhibitions, such as the one that closed the Viafarini residency in Milan, where she presented the work Reverb, which set off a production of relational disturbance among the viewers, since some of them were deaf-mute and were invited by the artist to communicate with each other, which they did through sign language, incomprehensible to those who speak and hear; this ended up creating a performance of signs that made communication between the two groups falter. In her latest exhibition in Croatia a choir, with bodies and faces to the wall but with bare backs, sings the song Wrong by Depeche Mode, while the space is scattered with real or fake cakes with phallic shapes, so that the liquids evoke ejaculation, eroticism and pornography inspired by Japanese bukkake. And again in the city, Reja, a large truck full of rotting, foul-smelling flowers, in a sort of great public vanitas in which art serves to remind us of the transience of life.
Translated from the Italian.