A Rogue Phi
Iva Korenčić
07.03. – 07.04.2024
Prsten Gallery

Exhibition opening: Thursday, 7th at 7 pm at Prsten Gallery

The backbone of Iva Korenčić’s intermedia work, A Rouge Phi, involves an exploration of identity through various materials, artistic techniques, and collaborative interactions, and I am slightly sorry to inform you that in this text succinctly expressing the concept of “identity” in language eludes me.

Of course, I know what it is about, just as you who are reading this know what it is about.

Mary Midgley would likely posthumously nod in agreement with our shared common sense, which fills the space between the lived experience of the mind, consciousness, identity, and their scientific forms.¹ In a more recent realm of contemporary philosophy, Federico Campagna might propose the recognition we just asserted as belonging to the fringes of “the ineffable dimension of existence” that cannot be captured by descriptive language and escapes all attempts to put it to ‘work’.²

The American Psychological Association’s dictionary defines personal identity as follows:

Identity – an individual’s sense of self defined by (a) a set of physical, psychological, and interpersonal characteristics that is not wholly shared with any other person and (b) a range of affiliations (e.g., ethnicity) and social roles. Identity involves a sense of continuity, or the feeling that one is the same person today that one was yesterday or last year (despite physical or other changes). Such a sense is derived from one’s body sensations; one’s body image; and the feeling that one’s memories, goals, values, expectations, and beliefs belong to the self.

If we take a closer look at any of the artist’s works, including this one, it is very clear that Korenčić has a longstanding (and quite studious) interest in the discourses of psychology, psychiatry, therapeutic practices, and related disciplines. This interest partly draws from her own lived experiences and partly from a persistent curiosity to understand exactly how organic beings like humans truly function apart from, and in synchronicity with, the striking and unavoidable fact that they exist in soft, living bodies and with each other.

However, the pursuit of this understanding in this work does not seem to have a strong desire to formulate any definitive answers. Korenčić is not ‘foolish’ to arbitrarily limit the space of individual (and social) imagination by chasing definitions. People do not function because they are not machines. People mostly just exist.

“For a long time, I wanted to become a doctor,” Korenčić tells me in one of our conversations about her practice, “All of that fascinated me, especially surgeries. But then I went into dance.” And life continued to unfold. After the Salzburg Dance Academy and ten years of professional activity, her career as a dancer was interrupted by a spinal injury. Soft, living bodies of performing arts are as fragile as any other, and the expectations and demands placed upon them in the name of art often outweigh the attention given to the fragility of these bodies.

For Korenčić, A Rouge Phi functions as a set of rehearsal exercises, improvisation of the choreography of the self. It is like a long instance of a (somewhat adapted) magical what-if,³ materialized in physical and visual materials rather than those of the stage. Although not explicitly named, the artist’s past in performing arts accumulates in the subtle recesses of this work, manifesting in the partially scenographic presentation of materials, the narrativity of art books and videos, the presence of costumes, or through the background methods the artist employs in the creation of artistic materials.

What if the chronology of someone’s history no longer consists of memories but of rags and threads? What if, it is also entirely flexible, even machine-washable? What if I exclude myself from myself, and inhabit, as a kind of illusion, the voids of exposed materials where there is nothing except everything that is not work? What if I obsess over my own identity in this manner, or someone else’s, if allowed? What if not allowed? What if I am allowed everything?Bottom of Form

There is a high level of internal organization and analytical prowess that create the system through which Korenčić operates and arranges the spatial installation. In this system, all elements of the work continually draw gravitational forces from each other to maintain a precisely defined schedule of formation and semi-decay. “Material exhaustion” is the phrase the artist uses to denote this approach.

With a closer gaze, however, it becomes clear that the created materials are never fully “exhausted,” nor perhaps can they be – because every end of something, within the work environment, marks the beginning of something else. The large soft fabric sculpture is seemingly exhausted by the repeated cutting and stitching of its pieces, but any constellation of disintegration merely hints at the formation of a new constellation. Korenčić even collects all cut threads, excesses, leftover small pieces of fabric, and uses them as aesthetically filling for transparent plastic objects in space. The only thing that can be exhausted is the initial form of raw materials, the shape in which they came before they were given the opportunity for eclectic metamorphosis.

Within the artistic process for Rouge Phi, almost nothing is discarded – there is no distinguishing factor that marks some materials as more significant than others. It does not exist because no one has defined it. Decisions are not made. Everything is significant. It might come in handy. “Excess” is a forgotten category.

Out of this almost horror vacui characteristic of the work, two thin and flexible organizational lines arise – one that visually saturates the gaze, even somewhat forcing the materials to be beautiful; and the other that brings something like enchantment with the very act (often repetitive) of creating certain elements and textures, raising the question for whose exact gaze all of this we are now looking at has even originated.

The materials of the artist’s installation are visually bold and defined; she is quite confident in the visual language she develops and her own ability to navigate within its framework. Although the choice of raw materials (such as the remains of plastic pharmaceutical packaging or waste fabric) suggests a certain sharpness or ugliness, her materials, consciously or unconsciously, mostly feign restraint. On one hand, they want to be liked, almost as if they have to. That is probably why they are so rich in tactile textures and brimming with ocular information. If we offer the gaze enough and quickly enough, it will tire of the euphoria of looking, perhaps even merge with what is being looked at – perhaps that merging is precisely the main intention.

Although the resulting artistic materials are exhibited in a gallery space that is, more or less, accessible to the general public, Korenčić never actually grants us access to the whole story. She would rather suggest that every stitch on the fabric marks a specific event. Perhaps she will even mention them – Here is the summer spent in a camper. Here is the house that used to be mine. Here is the dog I was planning to adopt. Here are the newsstand and the snow. Here are the people with whom I thought I was happy.

She will explain very consistently how the central hole of the hanging sculpture bears similarities to the way people with borderline personality disorder perceive their identity, or that the layering of visuals in artistic books is reminiscent of what someone experiencing a panic attack might go through. But is that her diagnosis? The diagnosis of someone very close to her? Whom and what do the people in the illustrations represent? To whom are the fragmented sentences that appear throughout the work addressed? How do we even construct something as a “diagnosis”? Is this once again just about that aforementioned longstanding interest in the topics of medical psychiatry? People are not machines; that is why they do not function.

In the context of a world that is largely losing privacy (if it even still exists), such restraint is surprisingly refreshing, especially in the context of contemporary art, which often unnecessarily fetishizes women’s issues or insists on a voyeuristic perspective of looking at them. Korenčić does not give us the whole story for a simple reason – she has chosen not to. Like documentary fiction, she has allowed herself occasional blurring of the lens of perception.

If performers give their all on stage, with bodies that are as fragile as any other, nothing is left for themselves when they get home. Only half of everything we see in the installation space is created for our gaze; the other half is exclusively for her. People mostly just exist.

___________________________________________________________

1 Mary Midgley, “Are you an illusion?“, 2014, Routledge

2 Federico Campagna, “Technic & Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality”, 2018, Bloomsbury Academic

3 the “magic if“ technique by Konstantin Stanislavski