Irena Lagator Pejović

works

Lines, Values, Coexistences

2024

process oriented, interactive installation

hand-made gilded cotton strings on a grid

collective action at the end of exhibition when each line will be wound back into a skein and thus providing working hours for people in need

90 x 630 cm

Courtesy of the artist and < rotor >, Graz, Austria.

Exhibitions/Venues:

- EX-SITU: Artistic Positions on Endangered Biodiversity and the Coexistence of Species, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, curators: Margarethe Makovec and Anton Lederer, < rotor >, 2024

- IN-SITU. Artistic Positions on Endangered Biodiversity and the Coexistence of Species. < rotor >, Graz, Austria, curators: Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer, 2024.

Photo: Irena Lagator Pejović

The interactive installation Lines, Values, Coexistences is an arrangement comprised of numerous manually wound gilded cotton strings. These glittering skeins are fixed with knots to the grids at one end, while the other remains free for extraction towards the depths of the exhibition space through audience interaction. The haptic connection with the artwork and material allows for its continuous modification: lines are in motion, surfaces are expanded, lights transform into meaningful physical as well as critical ecological-economic engagement, because at the end of the exhibition, they need to be returned to their original state, each line wound back into a skein.

From Point and Line to Plane (Kandinsky) this seemingly abstract image assumes the role of rendering visible global social, political, and biodiversity crisis, while also demonstrating and offering a method of overcoming them showing that the museum, the exhibition space can also be the place where we can encounter and care for each other.

This installation works critically with the concepts of the real and representational through the material use of gold: as natural element, as a painting’s background revolutionized by Giotto assigning it discourse, and as value i.e. the golden standard that ceased to back banknotes in the 70s – a time of the dematerialization of the work of art and a decade in which Pasolini’s political essay Where have all the Fireflies Gone speak about the disappearance of the fireflies, pointing to the inextricable link between environmental and crisis of neoliberalism. Triggering the strategies of bio-culture, togetherness, collective action and solidarity, this installation functions as a postulate to brake the spiral of extinction, exploitation and exclusion. In the context of cultural institutions, it provides labor for the vulnerable to propose a new model of ecological awareness, community and symbiosis. What is exhibited here is our common labor. It becomes a lived-through experience and a document of testimony that our survival on the planet depend on our collective and shared responsibility for the global biodiversity. This gilded horizon of artificial fireflies emphasizes humbleness, hope and the urgent political relevance of art for environmental and social alternative, at the same time questioning the limits of art and its autonomy. (Irena Lagator Pejović)