THE BLACK GODDESS ASCENDING

   The cycle of paintings DARK GODDESS ASCENDING is a continuation and elaboration of the cycle DARK GODDESS IN POMPEII and THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE DARK GODDESS in which I dealt with the appearance of the mythical Dark Goddess, present in different civilizations and religions, in various forms throughout human history. 
(By returning to the narrative, I tried to deconstruct the construction of the myth and establish that myth through personal fiction. Research on the Black Goddess combines fiction and faction with the goal of relativizing any general place in the interpretation of history, which is not prone to re-examination and change.)

  This opus contains initial impulses from widespread mythologies but also establishes connections with stories from the New and Old Testaments, which makes this opus extremely interesting in view through postmodernist discourse. On a formal level, images range from figuration to abstraction, making that the cycle assumes an ambivalent framework, thus erasing the clear boundary between poetics while still retaining the homogeneous visual identity that defines the theme.

 

                           

                               

 FRICTION

Belgrade City Library – Gallery Atrium

Friction

A Judeo-Christian view of the West is characterized by the belief that history has an objective or at least a direction. Conversely, the understanding of history in non-Western cultures and inPre-Socraticopinion was determined by the cyclical idea of eternal return. Then, the Enlightenment changed the idea of the time flow…..

Georg G.Iggers: Historiography in the Twentieth Century.

Friction is a multimedia exhibition resulting from the experimental film Friction[1](premiered at the 65^th edition of The March Festival – Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival, 2018).

The idea of this exhibition is to transgress the line between certain media, where the content would flow from one medium into another, while constantly emphasizing the threshold between them.

It is a postmodern process which draws the basic content into several directions, diversifying it, where each branch still belongs to the source, but is at the same time a new conceptual and thought form with its own narrative and its own artistic identity. By examining the narrative as well as the abstractness of the form, this exhibition accentuates the multitude of interpretation of the works themselves and the diversity of experience in the observer.

A symbolic intent permeates throughout the film - different circular forms which suggest the continuity of the time flow through cyclical processes. Through works in the artistic form, the time flow itself is reduced to abstract images, which have no beginning or end (as features defining the abstraction), however,micro manifestations may be perceived in them, which, by their presence, deconstruct the entire idea of Absolute-abstraction, placing the movie and artistic manifestations emerging from it in an ambivalent and interactive relationship. By building a boundary zone, open to all types of interpretation and reading, the boundary zone of indeterminacy, this exhibition emphasizes that the only valid gravity point is our own individual experience, the viewpoint which participates in the transmutation of consciousness and helps us to see reality in a completely new and extraordinary way.

Such a view allows for a wide array of expressive means and experimental complexity by examining the stylistic crossing of abstract and figural (real) elements and not relating to one expressive style only. By establishing the framework of the inner system, this exhibition seeks to develop the language capable of causing various paths of penetration into an inert everyday life, thus creating a language system through which the effects of deconstruction, nominalism, recycling, permeation and eclecticism pervade.

---

[1]The film Friction, through various formal manifestations and their simultaneous perception, refers to the very process of perception and re-examination (of the perception process) through different thinking systems.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BLACK GODDESS

 The Cultural Centre/ Kovin

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BLACK GODDESS

The eye, which Stevenson so wonderfully calls a treat for cannibals, for us is such a disturbing object that we will never bite it...^[1]

The cycle of paintings THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BLACK GODDESS is the sequel and further elaboration of the cycle The Black Goddess in Pompeii, in which I dealt with the existence of the mythical Black Goddess, which is present in different civilizations and religions, in different shapes through the entire human history (Through the return to the narrative, I tried to deconstruct the creation of the myth, and to base that myth on personal fiction. The research on the Black Goddess combines fiction and facts in order to relativize any common ground in the interpretation of history, which is not inclined towards repeated reassessments and changing).

By elaborating the cycle The Black Goddess in Pompeii, I have reached space-images on a formal level, which build their existence in three dimensions with specific material artefacts built into them.

Each of the built-in materials (nails, apples, ceramic eyes, chestnuts, chess figures and boards, parts of sewing machines, pieces of ceramics) has its own precise symbolic value and a precise place of installation, but it is important to stress that all the artifacts have a double, ambivalent role. The first one involves supporting the narrative flow on a symbolic level, and the second one to use their existence to break the illusionistic concept of the painting, emphasizing the physical conditioning of the space and factual matter, all the while relativizing the line between illusion and reality.

Space images refer to several concepts in modern art (ready-made, counter-reliefs), in order to also be perceived as postmodern products that problematize the relationship between modernist research and the narrative in visual arts.

---

[1] Ž. Bataj, The Documents 1929