Marta Kiš - "Anita Sulimanović: CITY site-specific installation in Barrel Gallery"
Catalogue preview
...And then it was as if Dogville just waited. Even the wind dropped, leaving the town in an unfamiliar calm. As if somebody had put a large cheese dish cover over it, and created the kind of quietness that descends while you're awaiting visitors.*
In hands of artist Anita Sulimanović, space of Barrel Gallery has been transformed into an unusual settlement of former dog's homes. Exhibition consists of fifteen objects found in Zagreb's suburbs or in the city, set in the gallery space in row that may remind us of settlements that are built more or less according to a plan. One of the objects rises above from the row, creating installation of interesting visual and spatial characteristics. This surreal element shows that it is not only about randomly shown found objects and their visual quality, but about multilevel story that exists behind each actor and behind the whole ensemble.
In her recent work Anita Sulimanović is using found objects transforming them into site-specific installations which main characteristic, along with clearly present concept, is visual quality, which manifests in comprehension of the space emphasized through sharp, intelligent interventions. Perhaps artist’s visual sensibility was primary strength that attracted her to picturesque kennels. But their setting into clear, rounded, symmetrical space of Barrel Gallery, alteration of their usual surrounding, dislocation and decontextualisation, make an important artistic concept, that emphasizes its visual value but also simulates new meanings or points to existing meanings.
Social component is inevitable and very important element of the work. From the word doghouse, for some of them quite inappropriate and gentle title, many issues that enclose micro and macro levels of our society can be read. Looking daily at these constructions within their primary ambient, even at the very center of Zagreb, we probably won’t notice, less likely read their multi-meanings. Diversity of kennel’s shapes, that can be view as mare curiosity, points to much more serious issues. Lack of kennel building regulations is probably much easier to comprehend through lack of same regulations in building real, big homes projects as well as whole urban entities along Croatia. Walking along Zagreb’s residential area Tresnjevka, is it realistic to expect sensitivity for best human friend’s homes, when there is no sensitivity for human itself? Kennels – homes for dogs on short chains, which limits dog’s life on only few meters of space and food – from frustration surely delivers aggression. The aggression is probably life role of the housekeeper, furious barker, frightener of potential intruder. Its insensitive owner in his hard life circumstances had no time to think about more human relation to the animal or he just copied his way of life in which some greater power is keeping him on chain. This vicious circle will not and cannot be changed by any dog or any man. Civil society will go through many more battles with its constant antagonists, more government will fall and more crises will pass until the improvement of standard and quality of life will break this inhuman practice.
By adding light accent into some of the kennels, most of us will get chance to look what is hiding inside for the first time, a chance to look the house and everything it presents from every angle. In addition to the view from above (from Gallery PM) and view from below at object hanged in the space, the author made the most of spatial possibilities that she had been offered. It is precisely these isolated inner lights that are connecting elements that may provoke apparition. Fear of what might expect us in unknown, small space. Fear of what this space presents. The artist is setting up a challenge, by minimal intervention, by installation that reminds us of an abstracted set-design of abandoned dog’s settlement, recalls many associations and sets up many questions from contemplative personal to wider social. Aiming to emphasize them, visual element as a promoter is crucial in this tale, along with perceptiveness for space primary to sculpture and powerful tool in hands of Anita Sulimanović.
Marta Kiš
* Quotation from the movie Dogville, Lars von Trier (2003)
Exibition Review
Anita Sulimanovic's Solo Exhibition - Gallery «Karas», 1999.
Enes Quien
SYMBOLIC FORMS – FORMS OF SYMBOLS
On a thin thread connecting sense and sensibility with material existence of sculpture, Anita Sulimanović, the young sculptress, fully grown in her style, built the scenes of profiled visions of forms “borrowed” from nature and performed in the best manner of archaic morphological modifications. Namely, the world of biologic, organic micro-structures, is in these inventive sculptures, are transformed into a form-making with a major measure of antipathetic effectiveness and, humble allusions on the symbolism of organic life. The huge masses of her sculptural works, also bring the matrix of meaning of the traditionally conceptualized and formally realized sculpture, and also a certain silenced (post)conceptual charge in coquettishness with the literalness of suggestion. Anyway, Anita is not able to escape from variable coding of sculptural masses, as a system for decyphering psycho-physiologic impulses, that are almost self-referential in meaning. This is to say, that the allusiveness of the sculptures with rich formal characteristics, is firmly and unseparatively correlated with her stands toward the relation of woman in art, woman in relation with her own existence in accordance with the world around her, and, woman in relation with the social and human principles inside which she is living. Somehow, oversensitive symbolism of gentle dialogue with moribund and sepulchral associations in the sculptures “Grave”, “Hole” or “The Mummy”, uncover the idea of relentless, curious and somehow uncertain nature that, in the resulting sculpture, is to be decyphered as excellent stylistic material, outstandingly sure-handed and complete in ideas, embodied in a powerful form. There is also the excessive quantity of irony and wit: each of the sculptures brings in its firm internal core the principle of decay, in equilibrium with the outer “protective” shell. The space of cavity in the center, in the core of the sculpture, and the strong envelope that surrounds the space, have equally important role, suggesting a meaningful seal of the enigma, the secret, the mystery of existence.
The organic of these sculptures is detouring from preceding Anita’s ideas, evolving at least as much as the scaly, tiley and shelly membranes of egg-like forms of her previous works are now more open, and, let me say, more vulnerable bodies. These newer sculptures got more transparent, more fluid, more mobile, more asymmetric, with many more confronted rhythms, and therefore more astral, in their greater organic and associative-symbolic strength, close to the ideas of Anish Kapoor seeing sculpture as a procesual body in the eternal dialectic dematerialisation, so that by shrinking the materia it might stepwise convert into a clean empty cosmic space. Black holes. Such a nerve is, to some extent, present also in Anita’s system of mind – the astrality is strengthened with the possibilities of lost space, for an instant open and then, a moment later, closed again, imprisoned by rough and raw, in a way of surface modulation, totally distorted, dynamic, outer shell. The use of a hollow space in building the sculpture through its forcefying role is founding the growth of symbolic connotations that seem to rise toward the first plane of enlarged and isolated image of stiffened jelly human biology. Archetype and symbolism of forms are also emphasized through foggy, dreamy and imaginative reflections of historic layers, from ancient Egypt on, to the archaeology of old necropolises, hundreds of years ago.
Featured in a convincing way, Anita’s sculptures are structured in full forms, with lot of freshness and some magic internal pulsation of vital energy. They are close to the myth, with the additional measure of dignity, out of which the inclination is radiating to discuss the timelessness, or the richness of the layers of assonances of time. Anita’s sculptures present the order - away of any vane sculpture-like animation. The powerful volumes of sculptures realize a successful dialogue, in discursive method, with the structure of the monumental space they rest in, and which is spreading out from themselves.
Anita Sulimanović did always, also, demonstrate the interest for really typical and necessary exploration of sculptural materials. Trained in modeling of clay and plaster, in carving different sorts of stone and knowing, in more than one way, how to cast in molds and chase, this young artist did, in her previous stone-cutting, listen to the marks trying not to “hurt”, closing up the form that was suggesting in its interior, the fragility and softness. In more recent sculptures, except the evolution toward the more open form, she confirmed the figuration with forms made out of different materials, like concrete, polyester, wax, glass and so on.
With this exposition, the combination of the materials went even further – the concrete is mixed with plaster, polyurethane, terra-cotta, glass, and there are also added other elements, like sponges. Yet, each material is rigorously subordinated to the idea based on the ancient dualism of west- European art, between the theory of form and the executive practices – between the technique and poetic, and, finally between the thinking and the existence itself. Anita’s sculptures, no matter what rustic “roughness” there is on the outer surface, give the notion of a refine sensibility, and, let us keep in mind, Herbert Read wrote that the sensitivity is the basis of our consciousness. Altogether each thinking is searching a content, and the content is originating from our contact with the surrounding. Anita is the artist with the developed perception for surrounding, out of which she gets the formal irritations and transforms them, later, by the aid of her strong sculptural mind, into her image of the world. The enigma of the allusive post-mortal – biologic spheres which she is expressing through the symbolic and metaphoric, Anita is presenting, also, a good deal of intuitive absorption of cultural items where are included as well her sculptural identity and classification. The identity as well as the classification of highly perceptive and intuitive sculptural structure are accordingly coexisting with an extraordinary sensibility for dynamic expression, anchored in internal static of strong sculptural tissue.
Witty and soft daily political adherence is evident in the sculpture “The Outflow of Brains”. The flowing mass, stiffened and stopped forever in the sculpture is her comment on the Croatian situation, where the educated persons are tending to leave, but, most importantly the simplicity of the solving form of absolutely contemporary conception of sculpture. The addition of mirror to some works, is a new element of the double game of illusion in symmetric projection of the real body in space. This way, the outflow of the brains is being projected on the higher level of consciousness, as well as the broken heart in the grave, which expands the drama of the idea of the relativity of life, to the final limits. Therefore, the elementary quality of structural activity of Anita Sulimanović is confirmed on the level of symbolic forms bottomed-up into the forms of symbols. The cause and the consequence are understandable world of authentic plasticity.
Exibition Review, Gallery «NOVA»,
Published in «Vijesnik», 1998.
Enes Quien
STRONG-CORE SCULPTURE
The young Zagrebian sculptress Anita Sulimanović (born l972, studied sculpture on the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of professor Šime Vulas), with her fourth solo exhibition in Galleria Nova in Zagreb, shows a strong, close relation toward a form tending a firm internal core. The sculptress is skilled in cutting the stone being a member of many colonies in a Mediterranean surroundings. She exhibited abroad, in the first place in Czech Republic several times. One can remember her sculptures made in pure, white Brač marble or Istrian stone, precisely carved and always meant as monolith stereo-metric bodies in the space. In this show, the sculptress changed the material, but in no case her style, that she earlier proliferated in stone with her sharp mental will. Now, she is showing six sculptures made of concrete (“A sophisticated muscle” and “The BA Process”) or in some combination of concrete and wax (“Some Ž World”), or she mixes the concrete with wood and polyester (“Just like this” and “The Cracking World”), but the sculpture “The Left Hand” is performed in plaster, glass and polyester. One might say nothing new, in sculpture, the materials are just (postmodern) tools to express certain ideas. The source of sculpture enthusiasm Anita Sulimanović finds in the entities of the world, that she wants to stop in her sculpture – as fragment of nature – forever. The fascination with wavy sea, cycle and rhythm of of waves flowing in perfectly neat order, within a symmetric order and time in determined direction, to grow through a crescendo into a storm, or lowering down till still-stand, this is to be the matrix of those sculptures.
The curious forms of superficial structures might be, and in the most cases they will be, understood on the associative level, as the order of roof tiles, the bark of the tree, waves or some fish scales. But, this play on the sharp and dangerous edge of associations and guessing what is what, because it varies between figurative and abstract, is wrong. The sculptures of Anita Sulimanović might present all of those and much more in the associative sense, but they doesn't have to be any of these, anything specific in the natural mimetic reading.
In the first place, the artist is sharpening and aiming her excellently developed perception and talent to understand the basic archetype form. She is well orientated in the relations of the strong form closed into the core, that, with reason, has an oval form – imitating shelter, protection, so to say, with some exaggerating, the placenta. This vision of sculpture is close to the Branchusian modernity, in the apprehension that leads the sculpture to the maximal simplicity, turning it to the very substance, to the shear existence.
In the Sulimanović’s sculptures there are no holes, no piercing of masses, no spacey protrusions in volume or masses. The dynamics of the sculpture is limited on the playful symmetry of outer envelope. Shall we in it the wings of the seagull, is again, less important. These are not pictural-analytic categories and it is totally clear that the young artist does not even subconsciously tend toward the "cheap" decorative sketching of some associative nice natural form, but she wants to create the clean, peaceful, simple sculpture, optically decisive in its functional aesthetic charm. She does it with the skill of the master, and there lies the high quality of suggestiveness of the sculptures of Anita Sulimanović.
