Prozori 18/19
Dragana Sapanjoš is an artist who is insufficiently present on the domestic art scene, but which she nevertheless marks by her distinctive performative projects with phantasmagorical scenery, performs the work In the Right Place for Prozori Gallery.
In lieu of the Gallery’s recognisable sequence of windows, the audience is welcomed by a black, opaque plane that extends throughout the entire facade. At the site of the transparent glass membrane between the interior and the exterior – which opens up space at both sides, and enables interference and communication of existing entities by serving as a labile shield or the shelter’s threshold – Dragana Sapanjoš constructs an opaque barrier. With the uncompromising gesture of covering the windows with black matte foil, she captures the view, annuls the interior, negates the content. The view, however, is not entirely suspended. There is a mistake or a deliberate omission, a tiny hole, a crack through which it is possible to peep. Behind this sole possibility of viewing, there is a small colourful glass parrot, produced especially for this occasion, which is hanging in the interior of the space like a small, isolated, colourful object against the black background void of content.
The barely visible hole is also the place around which the dramaturgy of performance is established. Specifically, in front of the blackened sequence, faced by non-windows, there are eleven extras in standing position. Equipped with black coats and uniform black buckets, they form an estranged scenery that awaits the visitors once they arrive at the performance/exhibition opening. When somebody approaches the hole and peeps through it, the extras loudly pronounce the word “egoist,” directed at the person who has momentarily claimed the only possibility of viewing and, at the same time, deprived somebody else of it. Then they reach into the buckets for black rags, with which they proceed to wipe the black surfaces before them, thus re-establishing order. This action is repeated until everybody has had their turn to peep through the hole.
Dragana’s performance has neither a beginning nor an end. It is a living image that lasts. It is equally as hermetic as it is open towards different interpretations and possible meanings, it carries a certain quantity of excitement, but also discomfort, even vagueness and unclearness. Ultimately, it establishes itself as a powerful visual and affective situation that is not entirely fathomable. In order to support this, the author avoids any kind of discursive elaboration, such as a defined statement or a catalogue foreword. Indeed, it is only sans mediation that the semantic field of work is possible to keep fully open towards another one; thereby, we enable – merely by depriving it of (any kind of) rhetoric and ideology – its unhindered linking into vast and unexpected structures of sets that are generated in these interactions. It is exactly in this linking, which encompasses the unclear and unfathomable states of humaneness between their extreme poles – such as reason and insanity, preservation and self-destruction, among others – that Dragana Sapanjoš sees a possibility of encompassing and grasping the mechanisms and the processes of negotiation between them.
English translation: Mirta Jurilj.