borisGlamocanin

/ ALL IN A DAY’S WORK / Splatterpool Gallery / Brooklyn NYC / 2012th

The exhibition All in a Day’s Work is comprised of Sandra Dukic’s The Anatomy of Female Feelings (2012), an installation containing embroidered cloths suspended in mid-air, and Boris Glamocanin’s Ode To the Revolutionaries & Myself (2012), which includes multiple life size human figure wall drawings that are to be finished by the hand of the viewer through the action of connecting numbered points.

The subject matter and questions which Dukic and Glamocanin have been pursuing from the very beginning of their artistic careers has always been oriented toward the self, while leaving room for the viewer to bring forward their own experiences and engagement — whether literally, as in the case of Glamocanin’s drawings, or in a more indirect manner, as in Dukic’s text-based pieces. At its core their work is about the possibilities/impossibilities of fulfilling one’s own needs, be they be social, emotional or sexual and the great effort and pains invested in that process.

Dukic, an avid admirer of words, has used text throughout her oeuvre. The artist embroiders conflicting sentences on kitchen cloths, such as “You should not be ashamed of yourbody / You could loose a bit of weight” or “You should be pretty all the time / It shouldn’t seem as if you are trying to hard”. The pieces are installed at eye level, forcing the viewer to read each statement and to be in close proximity to every cloth hung on a linen line with wooden pegs. The sewn statements are contemplations of a very intimate nature, yet at the same time, are based on clichés of how females are viewed and treated in our “progressive contemporary society.” Dukic very clearly brings out one’s constant need to negotiate the right and wrong answers and the instability of these very private messages. Using elements of craft with a very transparent and honest feminine voice, the artist exposes issues that women are often forced to deal with on a constant basis.

The human figure has been a crucial element in the drawings and paintings of Boris Glamocanin. The multiple series of connect the dots by numbers have taken different forms through the years, often having autobiographical references where Glamocanin himself is the protagonist in various scenarios. In his newest wall drawings, the artist moves away from the formal elements of a cartoon and opts to bring into play the language of social realism. One wall is dedicated to stoic male figures often in vigorous bodily postures. The depictions are inspired by monuments which were erected in post World War II Yugoslavia, referencing a period in history in which the worker was a symbol of progress and hard physical labor was the only salvation and answer to a brighter future. With the decline of workers’ unions at the beginning of the 21st century and the outsourcing of our work to the east (China & India), the artist brings into question the place of the physical employee in our society. The second wall drawing has a more personal and autobiographical tone, exploring the notions of belonging and how one defines the place that we call home.

The relationship between the two artworks within the gallery space is carefully orchestrated and choreographed. As the viewers enter, they are forced to walk through the dense labyrinth of Dukic’s text-based pieces in order to reach the open space of Glamocanin’s wall drawings. Once they arrive before the human size figures the task of finishing the instructive work by connecting dots begins. Ways in which the public will complete the heroes that Glamocanin composed remains to be seen over the course of the exhibition. 

Curated by  Boshko Boskovic

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// Project “Ljubija Kills” // Spaport / “Exposures” / 2010th

 

In their installation intervention “Ljubija Kills”, Sandra Dukic and Boris Glamočanin use the town of Ljubija as a metaphor of the way society produces people’s lives as unwanted waste and as an illustration while skillfully using the fact that Ljubija foundries manufacture sewer manholes. Ljubija is a small town 12 km away from Prijedor, which in the past consisted of two parts: Islam Ljubija (Lower Ljubija) and Latin Ljubija (Upper Ljubija or Ljubija mine). The Ljubija mine was one of the largest iron ore mines in the former Yugoslavia. In early summer 1992 the non-Serb population of Ljubija was arrested and taken to detention camps at Omarska and Keraterm. In 2004 the “Mittal Steel Company” bought 51% of the shares of the mining complex “Ljubija”. The official attitude of the Republic of Srpska on concentration camps in the Prijedor municipality has not changed much since 1992, when the footage of tortured prisoners behind the wire circled the world. Today Ljubija is struggling for survival. It is a town where, until recently, all the texts on the official webpage of the town were written in the past tense, a town where time stands still, and which is today a picture of deprivation, misery – a forgotten picture of life of Serbian refugees from other parts of BiH and Bosniac returnees to the previous ethnic cleared land. Serbs from Ljubija today are as forgotten and humiliated as the Muslims from Ljubija, located on the outskirts of what RS is intended to be. The neoliberal agenda of the Mittal Company seems to impose a single perspective, which will inevitably benefit everyone except the population of Ljubija. One aspect of this project documents some of the stories that witness to the misery of the “bare existence” of Ljubija population, while public interventions aim to draw public attention to these and related stories, which residents of many other places in the region can identify by. Meanwhile, artists work with women’s cooperatives in Ljubija, and use the public visibility of the project in order to sell, for the on behalf and for the benefit of the Ljubija cooperative, “souvenirs” that were designed by artists in the project and produced by women from Ljubija.

2010 DeLVe / Institute for the duration, location and variables (Ivana Bago & Antonia Majaca)