Tomo Savić-Gecan
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Curator: Elena Filipovic
Top image: Tomo Savić-Gecan Untitled (Jeu de Paume / Bergen Kunsthall), 2010 © Jeu de Paume. Photographer: Arno Gisinger
Tomo Savić-Gecan constructs artworks that literally exist between present and future, here and there, between one public space and another, and between the minds of a viewer, wherever they might be, and the institutional space of the exhibition, which might happen to be somewhere else. For instance, as when he devised a situation so that visitors to an exhibition about the theme of “economy” were asked to decide on the entrance price for the visitor that would enter immediately after him or her (Untitled, 2000). Or as in his piece shown in Venice for the 2005 Biennale, where a line of text on an exhibition space’s wall recounted that the number of visitors at that very moment entering an art center in Amsterdam was impacting the temperature of a public pool in Tallinn (the pool having been programmed to receive the real time information and alter its temperature in relation to it), (Untitled, 2005).
Untitled, 2010 is a major new project in two parts, one located in the Jeu de Paume, the other—it’s exact mirror image—in another institutional space, the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway. Each part will be an exact reconstruction of an existing space in the Jeu de Paume, but with a crucially changed detail: in each room, one of the walls will be devised so that it can slowly move at an infinitesimally small rate in relation to each visitor that enters the opposite room. Each slowing shrinking room will effectively be a reflection of the other, with the motion in one space being set off by the visitors to the other after a short delay.
Eliminating everything from the piece but the space itself, the “content” of the piece is the artist’s reconsideration of the conventional “white cube” of the institution, here doubled and made to almost monstrously (and increasingly claustrophobically) follow the actions of its double across town. Linking two institutions and two publics (some perhaps totally unaware that their entry to a room has consequences elsewhere), Savić-Gecan’s architectural intervention continues the artist’s preoccupation with envisioning artworks that create an aesthetic experience across distinct times and spaces.
In addition to this major new project, the artist will also show a new film that similarly connects two places and temporalities. In this first ever film by the artist, entitled (like all of his pieces), Untitled, he allows pictorial representation to enter his otherwise previously unrepresentable oeuvre. The film, as the artist attests, is not a documentation of one of his projects, but another method of conveying the ideas at the center of his practice: that the aesthetic experience normally attached to the traditional art object in his case, is elsewhere.
Tomo Savić-Gecan (b. 1967) have exhibited internationally in such venues as Manifesta 3, Ljubljana (2000); P.S. 1, New York (2002); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2003); the Croatian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale (2005); De Appel, Amsterdam (2006); Etablissement d’en face, Brussels (2006); and Apex Art, New York (2007).
Exhibition coproduced by Bergen Kunsthall and Jeu de Paume, Paris.
This exhibition is organized with support from Anything is Possible, FBKVB, Mondriaan Foundation and the City of Zagreb.
