2020
floor installation, fragments of broken facade glass from the same architectural facility in which the work is exhibited
30x200x200 cm
Exhibition/Venue: Night in Montenegro and Other Stories, Art gallery “Miodrag Dado Đurić“, 13. November salon, National Museum, Cetinje, Montenegro Curated by Petar Ćuković.
Photo of the installation: Lazar Pejović
The piece This is Not a Landscape Any Longer. Tolerance, Transparency, Transition stems from my many years of artistic and theoretical research into the history of the edifice of the branch of the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Cetinje, whose author was the Yugoslav architect Petar Vulović.
The installation makes visible the instability and fragility of the current socio-political and ecological moment of local and planetary character through the use of materials in emergence – fragments of broken facade glass from the same architectural facility in which the work is exhibited. The aim of this piece is a critical, but also poetic sensitization of our social being towards the effects of passivity and fragmentation of social responsibility that this piece testifies to. The piece also serves to encourage conversation about the present, about contemporary art while it is happening, especially when it comes to aspects of the landscape as an urban, architectural and environmental factor that continually shapes our perception.
In that process, I depart from Petar Lubarda’s statement “It is not a landscape” which he expressed while talking about his painting “Night in Montenegro” (1951), who, like his contemporary, the architect Petar Vulović while he was conceiving the original version (1960-64) of the bank - our present Art Gallery - was interested in the notions of derivatives and transformations of both the natural and the socio-political moments. I try to point out the potentials of consistent implementation of the process of tolerance and transparency from the local and specific to the current global transition of the Anthropocene, all in order to ask critiquing questions: how to learn from what remains; how to build on ruins?