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Transversal Rijeka-Ljubljana / Borderless crossing

TRANSART-CONNECTION Exhibition
Rijeka Underground Gallery – 2
Rukavina Residence, Sapjane, Croatia

Opening on Sunday, December 21th 2020 at 9.30PM

A transversal is a line that passes through two parallel lines on the same plane. The symbolism of the borders that divide Croatia and Slovenia are implicitly "encoded" in the title of this "event" by which we decided to undertake as "transversal transgression". At this time, a pandem(onium)ic is when every spiritual impulse is interpreted as access to ruling structures, whose autocracy demonstrates itself through increasingly intense manifestations. The "Rijeka Underground" platform is located in an apartment in the city center. For this occasion, it was relocated to a family house in Šapjana. After "Scorpio Rising", four of us from the core team wished to continue our mission with "Transversal", rediscovering the strong potential that is naturally smoldering in this area, despite the politics and media that try to paralyze and parallelize this area by keeping the connective tissue in constant disconnection. We are watching the world as it turns into a concentration camp. As far as we can see, parallel movement is allowed, but not permeation/intersection. We look at each other as if from trains on opposite tracks. We are all passengers just like in the "good old days" without a map, and yet, not headed to unknown territories, but very promising and frighteningly familiar ones. In an old family house, a kilometer away from the border crossing of Croatia-Slovenia lies the location of the first part of the Borderless Crossing, the Anti-State of each state, on the spiritual meridians of customs official Rousseau and the postman Cheval's ideal palace - set with a fireplace, pantry, and furniture that is at least a century old.

Exposé

At the turn of the 1970s to the early 1980s, the beginnings of punk, new wave, industrial rock, noise rock, "new rock" in our country - in Slovenia in Croatia, a very lively and creative connection of communication developed between Rijeka, Šapjana, Ilirska Bistrica (MKNŽ, Sokolski dom, "Hram" ...), Prema (Premski Grad), Pivke (House of Culture), and Ljubljana. Since this time, there has been an intense permeation, "interference" and erasure/transgression of unsustainable "boundaries" between "high" culture and subcultural events, not only in the field of music but also in a whole constellation of visual, media, and multimedia arts and among artists. The Slovenian group "IRWIN" (with their project "Was ist Kunst") presented itself at the long-term exhibition event at the Biennial of Young Artists of Yugoslavia in the mid-1980's, and by the end of the 1980's the group "Veš Slikar Svoj Dolg" Alen Ožbolt / Janez Jordan) joined, at 15.BM, as well as several Slavic painters and sculptors, who throughout the "war-torn 90's" joined, despite the disintegration of the SFRY, the independence of the "republic" in the states, strengthening a certain artistic communication and cooperation "across-borders" with Rijeka and the Rijeka art scene of the 1990s. At this "site-specific" exhibition in Šapjane during the end of the second "semi-lockdown", "pandemic" 2020, in difficult (if not, disabled) conditions of "normal" shortening and co-operation (physical, "Complete") in cross-border Art projects and "events", we decided to present artistic work, some of them at least through the "postal mail" (works of A. Ožbolt) or "new media", through video, "net", prints and similar transmitted and, in a "Hand", conceptually designed works (works by Aleksij Kobal and Roman Uranjek). The concept, design and implementation of the entire exhibition, was solely created by the initiators of the exhibition themselves, Croaartist and architect Igor Rukavina- and painter, graphic artist, comic book author and professor (APURI), Damir Stojnić, and curator, with these two, co-author, "designer" of the ambient, Site-Specific set-up/arrangement of the overall "non-gallery" exhibition in an otherwise residential and working space (with a number of rooms, of course) Rukavina Sapjan's "Art - residences" - Branko Cerovac (philosopher, art historian, author of this preface, co-authored with Damir Stojnic).

Our "underground" conception of the exhibition does not allow for a complete clean sweep of the living and working space, from all that currently exists, despite all of the "non-artistic" infrastructure and superstructures (object and sign, psycho-somatic, social ...); we do not strive to produce a simulacrum of gallery space in a sharp "self-isolation" from the otherwise "normal" existential environment, inhabited by various furniture, technical equipment, decorative and memorabilia and signs of normal functioning, moreover - "old-normal", even "old-fashioned", " Old-fashion "," retro- "," vintage ", and even" camp "," Kitsch "- existences.

Namely, under the pressure of a brutal, not at all aesthetic "COVID-ized" and "socially-distanced" order of values, it is precisely the "old-fashioned", "antique" normality that works - strangely, even "artistically", cum grano salis, clearly. Traces, "roadside signs", remains, relics, relics of "life", some radicalism of the "past" in opposition, rebellion against the "New World Order" - the setting of the New World, supposedly medically superior, disinfected and uniformly - synthesized "Brand New World "" -A (Zamjatin / Huxley / Houellebecq), cause a special shock, some new "Verfrendungs Effect" (B. Brecht), to which, we believe, we should also pay some attention. In institutional museum-gallery buildings, it is certainly interesting to dig in "hidden" storage units, basement rooms, in the mail, packages, loaded or placed shipments, in hemorrhoids, press-clipping, in-office decoration and not only in the officially allowed exhibitions or according to the codified "permanent exhibition" as in the exhibit itself.

Only aesthetic, Art-intention, Art-oriented perception is there to distinguish, differentiate, critically judge what is worthy of the status of Arte-fact from the found / exhibited objects, and what is not an "exhibit" of the exhibition but a mere "artificial" ingredient of modern life and work in a given social environment (culture).

In all of the works of the artists' that are presented in this exhibition, there is a present (implicit/explicit) and retro-avant-garde heritage (heritage awareness and an embedding of the "past" in modern and "new" artistic practice) and long-term re-examination of their own "private mythologies", artistic, poetic and methodological karma and dharma, whose beginnings, "roots" go deep into some ancient "old regime" there. Whose genesis is based on the experience of transition from the past and present. Marked by the confrontation of the "pandemic" whose image the new regime (s) seek to reduce to the kitsch "Coronavirus" - the imaginary and its constant "mutations".

Artistic and existential confrontation with it, "subversion" of this "fatal" situation, is the original motive behind this "on the edge", and "border-line" exhibition project.

Branko Cerovac / Damir Stojnic

About Bees and People
DAVID NEZ / OHO group

Rijeka Underground Gallery
July 3rd 2020 at 7pm

Curated by Damir Stojnic

Scorpio Rising
Lara Badurina, Vid Baric, Boris Buric, Petar Dakulovic, Antonio Kiselic Ledinsky, , Igor Eskinja, Klas Grdic, Predrag Kraljević - Kralj, Dalibor Martinis, Mitar Matic, Zdravko Milic, Toni Mestrovic, Goran Nemarnik - GUS, Igor Rukavina, Melita Sorola Stanicic, Damir Stojnic, Jasna Sikanja, Goran Stimac, Roman Uranjek, Predrag Todorovic

Rijeka Underground Gallery
May 29th 2020 at 9pm

Foreword by Branko Cerovac