Marina Paulenka
DRUGI DOM
Gallery PM
October 2 – 10, 2015

Opening of the exhibition on October 2, 2015

 

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE GRID TO THE WINDOW BARS

Grid functions as a kind of a genome in the genealogy of the so-called realistic representation in European art. Suffice is to recall that Alberti’s or Dürer’s  – device which is sometimes referred to as the veil or the grid, which mediates the creation of illusion so that what is seen in the image looks exactly like in reality. And it is, in fact, the mathematical construct:  geometrical perspective which, paradoxically, by bringing the subject of our interest closer irreversibly moves us from the real, thus producing our own idea of reality.

In the book The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman recalls the widely held viewpoint of film theory according to which cinema, via technologies like the camera obscura, the still camera and the stereoscope, is derived in some ultimate sense from the Renaissance, and the fact that its visual field is to a significant degree defined by the rules and ideology of monocular perspective. Since, in cinema, as in photography, the camera designates the point from which the spectacle is rendered intelligible, and maintenance of the perspectival illusion is assumed to depend upon a smooth meshing of the spectator with that apparatus. In the theories of viewing this process is referred to as the primary identification or identification with the apparatus, wherein cinema the ideological effect of the perspective is dependent on the identification with the apparatus.[1] Furthermore, Rebecca Schneider points to the hidden assumptions within a patriarchal economy of meaning. She claims that perspective, like the worldview to which it gives symbolic form, is deeply gendered. That is, the Seeing Eye is unseen, however its gaze penetrates a scopic field marked by distance. That gaze is rendered active, phallic, it is subject to and constituted by propriety of space. The given to be seen, rendered passive, is feminized, made into an object of phallic (gaze) penetration, yet infinitely inaccessible.[2]

Marina Paulenka’s project focuses precisely on the relation of the phrase given to be seen and dislocated femininity in the context which eludes normative regulated areas of femininity. And at the same time here the grid (bars) and that which is indeed given to be seen function as a signifier of the place (arena) and as the apparatus. It is, of course, the disciplinary apparatus, and the identical term in Croatian language, that is the word for the ‘photograph-taking device’, is all but accidental. Since the history of photography is inseparable from its biopolitical mission. Allan Sekula insisted on the perception of chronological coincidence of the appearance of normative sciences, photography and, statistics, i.e. their interaction in the production of a new object: the criminal body.

The referent of Marina Paulenka’s series of photographs taken in one women’s prison in Croatia is criminal, moreover gendered female body, which is, to use Foucault’s terms, surveyed and punished. The presence of this body is generated in a photographic image through the absence of concrete persons from the visible scene. What is given to be seen are things: clothing and various things that in the regime of representation connote femininity and Furniture equipped rooms devoid of human beings are nevertheless inhabited with their lives. Quite unlike many films whose plots take place in women’s prisons or documentaries that introduce us to the life stories of female prisoners and convicts, Marina Paulenka’s photographs question the meaning of the very concept of life.

Furthermore, the correlation between the title of the series Drugi dom (Second home) and visible scenes in photographic images, reveal not only the contradiction between the right to privacy and the absence of that right which the penitentiary implies, but also it leads us through Freud’s term unheimlich to the concept of abhorrence, or exclusion. Explaining the extension of the term, which   uncanny, Freud reaches for linguistics and literature citing the meaning of the word unheimlich specified in the dictionaries of German language and exemplifying it with the narratives of German literature. He explains that the meaning of the word unheimlich is opposite to the meaning of the word heimlich or heimisch signifying something that is “home related”, close or something that we are very familiar with. He concluded that the unheimlich is frightening precisely because we do not know it or we are not familiar with it.[3] This irreducible difference between the familiar and close, and what appears as such but is not and cannot be, is precisely that what resounds through series of questions raised by Marina Paulenka’a photographs.  It is on us to think if we can positively offer any answer. Because the walled window does not signify the same as hydrangea bush underneath it.

Leonida Kovač

 

[1] Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, poglavlje “The Gaze”, Routledge, London – New York, 1996, p. 125

[2] Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 62-63

[3] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, (trans. David McLintock), Penguin Books, London, 2003

 

Biography: 
Marina Paulenka was born in Vinkovci, Croatia, in 1985. She received her MA degree in Graphic Design from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, University of Zagreb and 2015 she received MA photography program of the Cinematography Department at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. She is a member of HDLU (Croatian artists’ associations)  and HDD (Croatian Association of Designers). She won the Dean’s award and the Special Rector’s Award. In 2015 she participated at NOOR Nikon Masterclass in Belgrade with Andrea

Bruce, Stanley Green, Kadir von Louhizen. She was a winner of Photonic Moments Portfolio Review 2014 at Month of Photography in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was nominated for Erste Fragments 2014, ESSL ART AWARD CEE 2015, and T-HT@MSU 2015 Award for Croatian contemporary art. Screenings and work presentations at Eastreet, Aleppo Photo Festival, NEU/NOW, Backlight, Photonic Moments, MOB Format festival.  She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.

The exhibition is financially supported by the City Office for Culture, Education and Sports Zagreb as the annual award of HDLU for the best young artists in 2013.

 

Working hours:
Tuesday to Friday 11 am – 8 pm,
Saturday and Sunday 10 am – 6 pm

Home of HDLU – Meštrović Pavilion
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb