ANA SLADETIC
Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenburg & Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt/Main
The walls that I chose had historical significance. I was not so much fascinated by the location itself, as by the historical and political context and the people‘s influence on it. I asked myself how in the course of history a wall loses its significance as a boundary or barrier. Here the wall almost becomes an abstract phenomenon, without prior sense within the new, redecorated space. Visual stains (frottage on paper) suggest that it is something “taken” from the matrix, “a record of the real surface”. White sheets of paper are used like white flags in the process of negotiation in relation to the border – the wall.
By transferring touch onto paper I do not transfer words, but something much more – the real memory of a place that becomes abstract, like history is abstract in our reality, because we can never experience the reality of the past. Searching for walls that have an abstract results, is similar to Don Quixote’s adventures. In his adventures Don Quixote sought for a higher purpose of human relationships. And it‘s interesting how his first books were walled up, so he could not reached them back.
*1985 Vukovar, Croatia, lives and works in Zagreb