Irena Lagator Pejović

works

Witnes of Time - Now

2002

site specific, work in public interest; appartment building, open shutters, 10 color prints, each color print: 180 x 80 cm

Texts:

- Ilaria Mariotti http://www.irenalagator.net/texts/ilaria%20mariotti%20Witnes%20of%20Time%20-Now.pdf

- Elke Krasny, Becoming Response-able: For a Feminist Ethics of Responsibility, in: Monika Leisch-Kiesl, TWO CITIES: An Aesthetic Approach to Ethical Responsibility. A Comparative Study of Selected Works by Irena Lagator Pejović and Christine de Pizan. VfMK Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna, 2024.

Exhibition: Reconstruction, 4th Cetinje International Biennial of Contemporary Art: ‘Housing Sculpture’

Curators: Iara Boubnova, Svetlana Racanović, Katarina Koskina, Andei Erofeev.

Venue: Public space, apartment building, Obiliceva street 4, Cetinje, Montenegro

Photo: Lazar Pejović

During the biennial, this work was awarded the UNESCO prize for visual arts:

Jury: Bojana Pejic, Henry Meyric Hughes, Petar Cukovic, Edi Muka, Patricia Jerez.

Doccumentation also awailable in collaborative project Archive of Cetinje Biennials.

In this site speciffic work, the focus is on making visible the act of ‘resistance’, which respond to the direct consequences of neoliberal demagogy of continual economic growth at the cost of demolishing public goods, communities, and instrumentalization of life as such. While examining housing in a wider context and drawing attention to current social and urban phenomena, this installation reminds us on omnipresent insisting of specific interests of individuals and certain interest groups under the pretext of individual freedom and brighter future.

,,In Witness of Time – Now, the characters are the absent owners of an appartment building whose construction was begun in 1989 and was completed in 2002, but was uninhabited until 2003. The apartments had been sold many times over, resulting in an infinite series of lawsuits that resulted with the long process of waiting for moving in for actual owners.

Irena Lagator, on that occasion, located many owners who, after she had taken photos of them, temporarily found a place inhabiting the open shutters of the still-empty building. The owners virtually lean out the windows of the palace. However, they continue to be excluded from their houses, just images pasted up and portrayed as busy with their daily household routines, displaying a kind of potential reality which is yet denied to them.

Space, territory and the question of relations are the concepts that interested Irena Lagator’s research from the very beginning of her career. The memory of places, the permanence of people and their ability to establish relations among themselves and with others are constantly present in the investigations of the artist. For the artist, this piece of work is a meaningful construction of an emotional and cognitive relationship between people. In it, the mechanisms of perception are stimulated by the construction of a work of art that enables a documentary, and at the same time empathic, reading of the contexts of which a visitor becomes part.

In Witness of Time – Now, individuals with their emotional baggage and personal stories are interpreted in terms of “collectivity” and “community”. The subjectivity is related to other subjectivities, and the artist points out the potential of the narration in personal stories that meet each other, cross and form the memory and the identity of the places inhabited.” – Ilaria Mariotti