MARIJANA STANIĆ
SWEET LIFE
Bačva Gallery, Home of HDLU
February 28 – March 13, 2019.

Opening of the exhibition: Thursday, February 28 at 7 pm at the Bačva Gallery (Home of HDLU)

 

Exhibition Sweet Life, by Marijana Stanić, will be opened on Thursday, February 28 at 7 pm at the Bačva Gallery (Home of HDLU). The exhibition is accompanied by a performance.

The performance can be seen for 3 days: February 28 (7 pm) / March 1 (5 pm) / March 2 (5 pm).

After that, video documentation of the performance can be seen in Bačva Gallery until the end of the exhibition.

“In fact, we understand girlhood as a space of pleasure and opportunity just as much as a place of coercion. And I do not know why we can not embrace it and accept it, find a way to talk about the negative aspects of this experience while enjoying its positive sides,” said Catherine Driscoll, a feminist theoretician in conversation with Barbar Gregg for Vox Feminne.[1] This sentence, with which Driscoll calls for understanding of the girlhood, a broad and complex field of cultural and social implications that characterize the life of young girls, on the one hand, exposed to brutal commodification and manipulation, and on the other, to social minorization, summarizes, precisely, as if it was an artist’s statement, key aspects of the exhibition Sweet Life, by Marijana Stanić. Composed of three, meaningfully interwoven, and somewhat identical, chapters of the girl’s dreams of love, which are rounded off by the show about an ideal marriage – wedding cake, bride figure, and eternal love – this exhibition emphasizes constitutive nods of discourse about girlhood, deformed in controversy between intimate expectations, popular culture, legislation, economics, social norms, sexuality, political subjectivity, and ultimately generational divisions.

The perfect life form girls’ fantasies is represented at the exhibition with the circular infinite white space of the Bačva Gallery, repeated in loop audio recordings of happy endings from fairy tales, by stringing infinite scenes of gorgeous wedding cakes, decorated with flowers and fruit garlands and by multiplying bridal figures in the space. However, this is not about one-sided or literal transposition of girls’ fantasies. Each segment of the work, in fact, suffered a certain intervention by which the author subverted the initial seduction. In an endless enumeration of cakes, for example, they take on absurd proportions, and creams and sugar ornaments cause nausea. The happy endings of fairy-tales are reading stuttering children, who have just learned to read, and in this difficult passage through the text, the life culmination of princesses and beauties (which are fairly active and effective during a fairy tale) is revealed as a definitive fixation of the new passive position: they are chosen, taken away, kissed and are happy for the rest of their life. The brides are, however, alive. They are beautiful and fragile in their exposure, all dressed up and almost immobile, with discrete choreography performing in three-hour performance, with their eyes closed. In such a constellation, where there is no boundary between the audience and the performer’s space, additionally burdened with the relationship between the one who looks and the one who is watched, the audience, drawn into the intimate space of the girls, becomes the voyeur, participating, even if unintentionally, in their objectification. The discomfort of the viewer is, in fact, a provocation, a call for understanding, and responsibility in the society we build.

From preface, written by Irena Bekić

 

[1] „Catherine Driscoll: Djevojaštvo je prostor užitka i mogućnosti jednako koliko i mjesto prinude“// https://voxfeminae.net/kultura/catherine-driscoll-djevojastvo-je-prostor-uzitka-i-mogucnosti-jednako-koliko-i-mjesto-prinude/ (21.2.2019)

 

 

 

Supported by:

    

 

The exhibition will remain open until March 13, 2019