Room

Central Room from exhibition Lealudvik: As it is, so be it at Škuc Gallery 23. 1.-20.2. 2020.

Curator: Tia Čiček 

They place the gesture of appropriation of religious images at the very centre of the exhibition, marking its forced beginning. In a room, surrounded by white pleat curtains, there is a banner with a fused image of both artists, headless, with eight hands and a calla lily at the point where the sexual organs should fuse. The image in the mandorla, surrounded by a nimbus, frames the exhibition title, written in a stylized Glagolitic alphabet. The phrase is duplicated on a carpet in front the banner that imitates a black hole in the room with an optical trick. In the play of symbols of black and white magic, and in the search for new and exciting occultist ceremonies, they challenge the tragic fate of an individual unwilling to accept the ultimate sacrifice - the abandonment of the ego. Playing with the symbolic meanings of such fusions also leads to a diversity of readings and understandings of the artists’ partnership, which, through motifs, multiplies in other works in the exhibition. By placing objects that illustrate the false sacral in the space in the middle of the exhibition, they mark it as the most sacred point which also illustrates the forced central setting of the exhibition. Through the creation of imaginary occultist symbolism, they question their partnership, as they look for parallels between cult structures and the entrapment of the individual in the rituals of capitalist contemporaneity. Questions like these are also raised in works exhibited in rooms around the sacral centre.

Tia Čiček

Photos: 1st by Lealudvik, other photos by Bojan Mijatović.