The Palmizana cultural summer continues with a new exhibition opened on September 15. Guest blog by Dagmar Meneghello.
The Zagreb sculptress Ivana Popović, in her dark and painful days, kneaded clay and shaped little heads, 10 000 of them. Each characteristic and different… within the huge assembly, she assigned them a common role – the role of observers. When she exhibited them in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, it was – as an expert art connoisseur, Ivo Šimat Banov, put it – “like an invasion and it elicited fear”.
The sculptor and excellent photographer from Rijeka, Andrej Šaprić, randomly separated some hundred little sculptures of observes and assigned their role to himself – to become an observer by painstakingly observing each one of them … He photographed them from every angle. He separated them from the group, situated them in the ever-changing nature, each one of them in different setting, another position, another part of the day, under different lights or different depths of dusk shadows.
The observers, powerful in group, in his photographs became individual, self-sufficient sculptures – worthy of their artistic expression both individually as in a group. However, the multitude, as their only reality and essence, with the aid of Andrej Šaprić’s magical photographs, disappeared… They still, in this manner, and scrutinized in detail by the eye of the photographer and his camera, remain faithful to the role given to them by the “mother”, the artist Ivana Popović – observers who observe their numerous, ever-new observers, visitors of the Palmižana gallery – representing a reciprocal dialogue without boundaries. The artist created them in an act of indeed religious designation, asking and requesting for support, strength, hope, flow / cosmic / circular streaming of energy. Going in and out from the unbroken spiral, Demur’s movements… Believing. From the same reasons from which the former inhabitants of the ancient civilizations manually shaped small new clay artifacts. I have ten of them – small antiques from the Geurrero area in Mexico, given to me by my friend Ingeborg Bal who lived one of the lives I wanted to live – wandering through this magical country and trying to extricate knowledge by studying the heritage of different ancient people of Mexico and the Guatemalan jungles.
Simultaneous holographic existence on this globe of ours, the Earth, is still impossible. In a world of unpredictability I was mesmerized by the world of a small island somewhere far from anything happening in the world.
As Šimat Banov says: “Let the body go where it can, and the spirit where it will.”
“Ma” means “no”, and “ya” means “pain”. The true meaning of the word “Maya” is a “painless” condition.
To be more precise, “state of awareness without pain”. The dwelling of the soul in the physical body is a synonym for a condition of pain. Our body bears with it physical pain, diseases, old age, infirmity. The soul outside the body is a synonym for a state without physical pain. Those who master the technique of leaving the physical body at willful command live a spiritual life without pain. “Mayans are not people. Nor a civilization. Mayans are not millions of poor farmers in Mexico or Guatemala. Mayans are not “proud” warriors from some two thousand years ago who relentlessly fought the neighboring towns in the jungles of Chiapas and Honduras. Maya is a state of awareness. Maya is the life of the soul who lives in harmony with the cosmic processes. Maya is a comprehension that the ephemeral physical body is only a vehicle aiding the spiritual development.”
Earthly horologists fix our watches and synchronize them with the earthly time. The Mayans were like cosmic horologists whose mission was to synchronize the frequency of the Earth with the vibrations of the Sun. They say “It is only after the Earth ‘starts vibrating’ in unison with the Sun, that the information will start flowing bidirectionally, without limitation. And only then it will become clear to us why all the ancient people “worshipped” the Sun. They dedicated to it their most important rituals, which we have forgotten in the everyday stress and hustle.
Belief is the source of life. Ivana Popović, suffering from the plague of today – cancer, with amputated breast, made her sculptures out of clay giving each one of them a different face, sharing the same hope of the ancient inhabitants of the Earth. How to discover one’s own quintassenze, how to master or admit the infirmity of one’s own body… “It is possible to make 10 000 sculptures meant ‘a test of the sculptor’s route” (Ivana), but the path is also more important than the sculpture. Maybe it was more important to restore the sensations in the right arm from which 28 lymph nodes were removed and to fetch the clay with that “worker’s hand”, to estimate the sculptures’ weight and form (almost equal) and then, with the other hand, the left one, to create physiognomies which merge and dissolve in the crowd.
Hence, if you do not wish to be observed, it is best to do what the unconventional and “weird” Ivana did: to observe the observers. To monitor them. Because she is, in a manner of speaking, their mother. “…in a manner of speaking”?! – They are her will, her fear and her cure. She can both kill them and give birth to them. And without them, our foggy “explanations” disappear too. Because interpreters are just as the observers. Dependent on others… ”/Ivo Šimat Banov /
Ivana Popović (1968) sculptress in the class of professor at ALU /Academy of Fine Arts/ Zagreb, painter, famous designer, with exhibitions, installations, and shows both in the country and abroad.
Andrej Šaprić (1985), sculptur and in the class of Prof. Slavomir Drinković at ALU in Zagreb.
