The exhibition (Un)lit rooms is a natural continuation, or a new layer of the previous cycle named Stratum presented to the Belgrade audience in the Graphic Collective Gallery at the beginning of 2016. These two exhibitions, separately and together represent a visual and ideological counterpoint of the cycle (Sub)ecumene (exhibited in the gallery SCC in Belgrade 2015) which presented an analysis of the stratification of man’s individual thoughts and tendencies opposed to a horizontal line of groups of people to which it temporarily or occasionally belongs. The new cycles examine the possibilities of the return of man into singularity, shedding light on the circumstances of the singular existence.
Practicing disappearance
Vague but persistent, dim but intense, as a synonym of divergence between the center and the axis, and a symptom of the painful inadequacy of the possessor in relation to the possession, and the view to the observer, a desire to be somewhere else arises. Now more than ever, with the mediation of the virtual ghosts, we reside in multiple incoherent spaces. The center of our own world never matches a static vertical. The ground is wet, softened and taken away by the desire for some other truthful landscape. The self driven characteristic of this desire is exhausting, but it tends to renew its force, pointing out the horror of the danger of inertness. The Inertness it seems is in place of solitude, which has been replaced by disconnection. Disconnection is a small death that follows the break in the continuous shift of the center from the axis, the unforgiving halt that is the opponent of the impetus of life.
The distancing, however, is not the only principle and motivator of movement. Solitude is not only the decay of the order in the form of an implosion. It is a precondition to the re-inhabiting of one’s own body. That re-inhabiting is a return from the horizontal of the plural existence and nomadic hunting wishing to be anywhere else, but at the place of the one’s own individualism. When the silent assumptions lose their power and the fear of all the small deaths abates, it is possible to practice disappearing, the self-abandonment and return to the spaces which pulsate in the darkness of the eyelids. What kind of darkness is this, one that can be both a supremacist landscape and deafening silence and a very deserted emptiness? The darkness scatters the details and points towards a whole, draws planes of the room that extends away from us and contracts inside us. It is diffused and huge, and man in relation to it is minuscule, but with a choice: to be defeated or impressed.