ABOUT
About Dear she
Visual artist Ana Kovačić
This website is part of the Dear project
Ana Kovačić: Dear she,
Playfully taking the greeting Dear she, a ritual form of expressing kindness and a positive attitude towards others, abstracting it from the work and moving it into the title of the exhibition, the author, Ana Kovačić, makes a full circle back to the starting point, giving it at the same time a symbolic function in relation to the entire exhibition setup. In other words, she treats the title as a synecdoche – a part that can encompass the whole. This communicational-empathic component embedded into the work welcomes us already in the title, where the comma, as something we do not expect to see there, suggests that everything we will see is directed, among others, to us.
The introduction to the exhibition is an object – a private photo album whose owner is unknown, which the author bought at the fleamarket. Placed in the lobby of the VN Gallery, stored in an antique display case, it dissolves in front of the audience in the form of a video projected on the glass of the display case. Its further rendering and presentation will be developed in different forms set up in the exhibition space. So if from this backbone of the work – from which our own and others’ narratives, temporal and spatial meanderings, shared and individual experiences, childhood and adulthood, art and life, spread like rhizomes – we try to enter its center, we will be greeted there by just a few portrait photos of the same protagonist – unknown, but Dear she, as the author addresses her. In the photos we follow her growing up in the period between 1935 and 1943 and they represent the introduction to the topic and the initial impulse from which the author starts her work. Isn’t this exactly what Barthes writes about in his discussion of the punctum; a surprise and a shock of recognition, a unique and personal reaction to a photographic detail – the punctum of a photograph is “a case that concerns me in it(…), a detail that attracts me” , but also wounds and hurts. When the author comes across a photograph of the same woman on the internet, this unusual coincidence seems to materialize Barthes’ metaphor of the umbilical cord that connects the photographed body with the viewer’s gaze. How can we get an insight into the private space shown in the photo? Only words can draw the curtain open. So while looking at the photograph, the author unties the knots of her own existence, interweaving it with parallel visual and textual narratives of others – people close to her, but also inviting participation and new entries of unknown others. Namely, the author does not conclude the art work with an exhibition, but creates its permanent extension in the form of a website-archive with an open invitation for other people’s experiences of the body, growing up, girlhood, motherhood, work. These artistic practices and strategies are based on the correlation of text and image, so the Letters to her, which the author writes to Dear she from the above mentioned photograph as a kind of introspective diary entries, are expanded with the texts of other dear women and friends with whom she engages in a dialogue related to various identity and existential preoccupations; and the empty pages of the found photo album are filled the author’s own photos and photos of her friends.
Moreover, the resemblence between the author and the woman in the photograph is uncanny, almost astonishing. By playing with the shots she chooses, the body posture, similar age or the environment in which she was photographed, the author creates a joint photo album in which identities are blurred. The strong attraction that lies in these intermingled family images also speaks of the unique relationship of photography to reality, which is defined through the discourse of alchemy, magic, indexing and fetishism. Counting on the power of the photographic image to enchant and seduce, the author unfolds the pages of the photo album again in front of the viewers by multyplying them and placing them next to the gallery windows, just as she exhibits the texts on the opposite wall.
In the precarious and changing constellations of life and work, these visual and textual correspondences weave a safety net, while the parallel exhibitional situation she creates – a kind of situation of work within work – speaks, among other things, about the feeling of belonging and not belonging to a community. I see it as the next axis around which he develops his work. Namely, in the space of the gallery, the author reconstructs her own art studio in which she places her earlier works – sculptural maquettes, sketches, casts, videos – encompassing them with the phrase “A Disappearing Exhibition”. These objects, made a long time ago, forgotten and left in the basements, that she finds in a half-decomposed state, describe an autobiographical arc referring to the author’s identity as a sculptor. She also thinks about herself as a sculptor in the Sketch for a Monument to Her, a model for a sculpture of the same female figure from the photographs, which was damaged in an earthquake and never executed. She places this sculptural sketch in the center of the exhibition space, an act which is both an artistic decision and economic reality, as concrete and relentless as when she writes: “Dear she, I feel such pressure. I have 4 hours a day to work, 4 hours that we pay for dearly. And my work does not bring income. 20 more days until Noa’s first birthday…”
Although in this work the author primarily addresses her female friends and other women, and although a significant part of the communication is related to the topic of motherhood and women’s life experience, and as such largely felt on one’s own skin, it would be wrong to fall into the trap of assuming that the established communication, and the exhibition itself, take place in a separate thematic zone. As an analogy, I will use a quote by Sarah Sahagian, which Barbara Pleić Tomić cites in her book “Mom Is making Lunch, Dad Is Reading the Newspaper”. Sahagian, in response to the astonishment about her engaging in motherhood studies despite not being a mother herself, states that: “Whether or not we are very close to the mothers who raised us, most of us have them”,2 which indicates that the real question is: Why shouldn’t we engage in the topic of motherhood? And I will expand it with the following: “Why shouldn’t the female experience concern everyone?” In other words, by dealing with intimate preoccupations, the author opens up topics that, not only reflect personal experience, but also mirror the wider picture of the world. Starting from herself, she thematizes the feeling of isolation and the potential of togetherness, the relationship between motherhood and creative work, the precariousness and existential insecurity additionally underlined by parenthood. Along those lines, the exhibition functions as an artistic observation about her own position as an artist, woman and mother in correlation with others and the world she lives in, as well as an honest and unadorned positioning within the zones of artistic work and systems to which she simultaneously belongs, but does not find refuge in.
¹Barthes, R. Camera Lucida
²Sahagian, S. I Became an Academic Expert On Motherhood Without Ever Having A Kid. xoJane.com.
About the author
Ana Kovačić was born in 1986 in Zagreb. In 2010, she graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and in 2013, she completed studies in new media at the Department of Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
Since 2014, she has been a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association.
Since 2021, she has been the founder and organizer of the CIMA Artist Residency in the city of Hvar, and from 2024, she has served as the program director of the social and cultural center Fabrika 35 in Hvar.
Since 2022, she has worked as an external associate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and since 2024, she holds the title of adjunct lecturer.
Since 2009, she has exhibited her work both individually and collectively. In 2019, she participated in residencies at the B.A.D. Foundation in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and in Kaunas, Lithuania. In 2016/2017, she attended a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
She was nominated for the Radoslav Putar Award in 2017, the T-HT Award in 2016, and the ESSL Award in 2013. In 2015, she won the Vizura Aperta Festival Award in Momjan. Her works are part of the Erste Bank collection.
In her artistic work, she explores the connection between personal and collective memory, as well as the ways in which memory is imprinted on our bodies and the spaces we inhabit.
Thank You
A big thank you to all my dear women!
Thanks to: Andrija Šobak, Petra Dolanjski Harni, Georges Senga, Noa Kovačić Senga, Pero Kovačić Senga, Ivana Brajčić, and Zdravko Bokulić.
Special thanks to the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.