(c) Archive Kathleen Bomani
Akademie Schloss Solitude warmly invites everybody to the openings of Ana Hušman and Ana Kovačić.
With the interactive installation Forest, happy birthday to you! by Vanja Babić and a reading by Zoltán Lesi on the opening night.
Ana Husman
6 by 7 Meters, Rehearsals for a Film
Ana Hušman’s film uniquely registers variations, frictions and narrative potentials of an urban living space-apartment which testifies about tensions, relationships and reconfigurations of its multiple lives and living conditions in a wider, social context.
Re-assembling theoretical references, various literary sources and personal observations, Ana Hušman portrays one of our living environments, and plays with different levels of realities (from the maquette recomposition towards the real-life frames of her living room). The key protagonists, artist’s collaborators as well as the artist herself, could be living there now, could have lived there at a certain point, or may just start to inhabit the specific space. In that specific procedure, a film collaborator becomes a film subject, never just a mere actor, the living room becomes a model for an ongoing exercise in multiple retelling styles, and the overall film structure deploys itself in an extended film-exhibition installation. Skillfully inhabiting us with her poetic universe, the artist, nevertheless, offers us enough self-critical tools to keep us at a safe distance of the mere »magic of the cinema«. And, while we move safely within and out of the artist’s working notes, collective recordings, text and sounds, all those separate elements help us to re-establish the well deserved balance between poetry, collective reflexion processes and spatial components that shape us.
Text by Ivana Meštrov
Ana Kovačić
Where is Home?
The video Where is Home is based on interviews with Croatian people living in Stuttgart. Baden- Württemberg is the federal state with the largest Croatian community in Germany. People mostly came for economical reasons, some for political reasons, from 1960 onwards and are still coming.
Whether the interlocutors were the ones who moved to live in Germany, or the ones born here, the conversations touch on themes of belonging, identification, insecurity, memory of bodies and spaces.
In her work Ana Kovačić explores the link between personal and social memory and its way to inscribe itself into bodies and into the spaces which people inhabit. Body shares some characteristics with space; they both witnessed lives, emotions, jumbled games of identities and relations; they both have marks accumulated by time inscribed into them; they are both palimpsests. Pierre Nora mentions the invisible thread that binds us and links seemingly unrelated. As he says, this »seemingly unrelated« forms a segmented network to which all separate identities belong to or the »seemingly unrelated« forms an unconscious organization of collective memory.
Ana Kovačić is a participant in the exchange program between Akademie Schloss Solitude the Center for Independent Culture and Youth (POGON), Zagreb.
Vanja Babić
Forest, Happy Birthday to You!
A lot of things were collected into an unprecedented whole in this story. Objects, information, people, narratives. It is hard to say what came first, but Vanja Babićs walks on the forest paths, next to Solitude turned into an encounter with a number of bottles and discarded objects, that caught his attention. Was it because of past encounters, or the encounters yet to come, with people in the city center who collected bottles. Was it while he was observing their organization, their tools, their mindset? Vanja Babić bought a pickup tool and a trolley and started collecting objects as well as information in the forest. The collection of bottles and items grew with every walk, so did the encounters with interested people, accidental passers-by, and fellows.
The way the objects were layered and piled, established a certain validity of classification which is not empirical. The sameness and the otherness were interpreted spatially and narratively to form a new dis/order. The found objects and information were documented and in the end exhibited as a group of photographs in the form of a map of the area where objects were found. They were grouped by days and categorized by different principles.
Admission is free!
On view: November 9 to December 17, 2017
Opening hours: Tue—DThur: 10 am—12 pm , 2—5 pm, Fri: 10 am—12 pm, 2—5 pm and Sat—Sun: 12—5 pm
participated in