PASSING BY AS ABSOLUTE SPACE OF TRAVEL

Exhibition Passing by Nika Radić, Multimedia Culture Centre Split (MCC), October 13-27, 2011

By Anita Kojundžić

In late October, at the Multimedia Culture Centre Split, Nika Radić’s second exhibition in Split since 1996 was held, although she is a very successful multimedia artist with over 30 solo exhibitions here and abroad. The author has been dealing with the issue of the (im)possibility of communication for many years now, the relationship between language and meaning and the issue of artistic reception.

Her latest exhibition combines two concepts that were created at different times and for different contexts: a video installation Passing by, created specifically for MCC, and a series of photographs on the one hand, with a cycle of digital prints called CV from 2009, on the other hand. The catalogue is also important for understanding the work because it has a series of brief descriptions where the artist presents her experiences of commuting, reflecting her belief that communication nowadays, as a means of procuring mutual experience, is greatly hindered.

Video installation Passing by is comprised of six projections that form a circle with rows of chairs pointing in different directions. The space is divided on the outside and the inside, and by going inside the viewer is caught in a net of monotonous scenes of travelling without a clear destination, bombarded by images. With the choice of a circular structure, the artist imposes no hierarchy or classical linear viewing. Moreover, she offers multiple perspectives that set a new role for the recipient who is no longer just a consumer but also a participant. The simultaneous playing of short films recorded while using different means of public transport creates an absolute, controlled space of “travel”. Drawing from her own experience and working in three cities (Zagreb, Vienna, Berlin), the artist successfully evokes the identity of a modern man who spends more and more time commuting in this globalized society, meeting unfamiliar  faces and killing time with discreet voyeurism.

The result of this discreet voyeurism is a series of photographs that are placed outside the circle, pictures secretly taken of people’s reflections in the windows on underground trains. The artist does not even use art as an excuse to take pictures of her fellow commuters directly. Therefore, she erases the boundary between herself as an artist and herself as a commuter/voyeur, the line between the sphere of art and the sphere of life.

In order to juxtapose this first part of accidental, instant and anonymous creations, there are prints of intimate places/apartments where she used to live in. The artist, however, seems just as distant as when she is taking pictures of anonymous passers-by: there are ground plans of the apartments, family photos with people wiped out and replaced by patches of colour that were digitally added, and the scenes reveal very few intimate details. Nevertheless, the architectural plans are hand-drawn from memory and covered by someone else’s technical drawings (her architect mother), showing diversity and selectivity, even fragility of personal memory. Just like stations or travel stops, the artist interprets private housing as equally ephemeral and temporary.

Although the two concepts can complement each other, their exhibition in the same space seems a far-fetched intervention that dilutes the tension of the video installation as a dynamic venue for simultaneous events. The most successful aspect is certainly Nina’s annulment of the mythical figure of the artist-creator and the idea of firmly separating art from reality. Especially with her video works, that resemble amateur films, the artist shifts the focus from the formal aspect to the reception of her work, which is essentially the object of her interest.