October 11 – November 17, 2013 Rijeka (Croatia) "No Other Country Than Liberty"

Lala Raščić

“No Country Other than Liberty”

SIZ Gallery in Mali Salon
Korzo 24
51000 Rijeka
Exhibition opening: October 2 at 20:00 h
The exhibition is opened October 2 – 8, 2013
Work days and Saturday 10:00 – 13:00 and 18:00 – 21:00, Sunday 10:00 – 13:00
SIZ Gallery presents Lala Raščić’s solo exhibition “No Country Other than Liberty”. The exhibition will show a newly-produced two-channel video installation “No Country Other than Liberty” and an older work, never exhibited in Croatia, video installation and a series of related glass panels “Whatever The Object”.
The text, which became a case study interpreted or analysed through the performance for the camera, was a starting point for both of these projects. In the video installation “Whatever The Object”, the starting point for the scenario were several stumbled upon, displaced pages, whose analysis runs through three different languages, listing facts without translation, in Croatian, English and German language. Unlike Sophie Calle who, by dissecting a letter from an ex-lover, gets a tragicomic result, the work “Whatever The Object” is like solving a mystery, the process through which the discovered text is placed into a precise geopolitical context of the Western Balkans and which speaks about the relationships existing in this area for over a century, whose consequences are felt even today.
A literary work, a travelogue, was Lala’s starting point for the two-channel video installation “No Country Other than Liberty”. The story takes place on the Mississippi River. The narrative stems from Elisee Reclus’s observations, a 19th century thinker, anarchist and geographer. In his book, “A Voyage to New Orleans“, he writes about the overlapping of modernity with nature, captures a young American society, and his descriptions seem like the descriptions of today’s society.
Although we could attribute the locating of these two works in two distant corners of the world, merely due to the fact that the artist lives between these two locations, we begin to notice similarities in historical narratives of the works. If we disregard the particularity of specific contexts, in both cases the artist places the present within a concrete historical sequence.
This year’s program of SIZ Gallery is curated by Fokus Grupa and Nemanja Cvijanović.