Irena Lagator Pejović

works

Missing Content

2023

installation, variable dimensions;

thirty-six empty cotton bags for the transport of metal money.

Exhibition/Venue: Exhibition/Venue: Irena Lagator Pejović, Expanses of Love, Art Gallery „Nadežda Petrović”, Čačak, Serbia, curated by Patrycja Rylko and Julka Marinković, 2023.

Courtesy of the artist and the Central Bank of Montenegro.

Photo of the installation: Ivan Petrović, Irena Lagator Pejović

The artist kindly requests from the Central bank of Montenegro the thirty-six empty cotton bags used for the transport of the metal money to display them as ready-mades in the exhibition space. The intention here is to call attention to their form. The bags are attached to the wall only by the back side, leaving their front sides freely open towards the audience. Thus their inner space becomes visible – their emptiness. In turn, the emptiness is given form, becoming shaped. Form is then the concreteness of the missing content.

Used on such a small surface, cotton as a soft and tender natural material receives the role of a different kind, the one that can serve and stand the heaviness of the coins during transport. We begin to wonder how this lightness affects us, users who are conditioned by the heaviness of productivity in everydayness. Is the lightness gone?

But that emptiness is accentuated by the trace of the missing coins that were transported in between banks and institutions in order to reach us – the users - to critically point to us the time in which, after all the goods are consumed, what remains is the risk that we ourselves be considered as contents. Thus, the emptiness here is receiving a double role. As a moment of eruption of unexpected liberation from our daily calculations, because the money is just gone, it is missing, and we suddenly feel free. On the other hand, this emptiness carried by the lightness of the cotton serves as a critical reminder about the orchestrated system of control and power capturing our daily lives in rhythms that come and go at the speed of light. Noticing both of these possibilities that the missing content communicates to us, we confront our reality constructed where it embodies to us as critical a call for rediscovery of what is crucial for, in Latour’s words, Down to Earth – as a form. (Irena Lagator Pejović)