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IRENA LAGATOR PEJOVIĆ My installations, objects, videos, photographs and drawings reflect on topics like the perception and understanding of reality, individual and collective identity and the responsibility of society and its individual members. Embedded in criticality and the poetic reconstruction of reality, my practice focuses on relations that evidence the transformation of society, life, art and culture, promoting new horizons. While addressing global issues, my exhibitions should be understood as universal propositions aiming to investigate the limits of both art and society.
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For the exhibition “If you cannot move the mountain, you can come closer to it” at “Real Presence”, curated by Biljana Tomić and Dobrila Denegri, I showed the work “Tell Why”. Due to the wars in Yugoslavia during the 1990s, we witnessed the interruption of knowledge exchange and the almost complete closure of the publication and translation industry. This object is composed of books published in the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia whose titles form a sentence: “The Earth of The People, From This Cradle, Generation Shift, Deep Crevices, Unused Resources, The Lost Homeland, Time of Death, Tell Why”... Using titles and book forms as the material for this object, I wanted to make visible the question of content as such. Paradoxically, in the profit oriented society of neoliberal global capitalism, content has become one of the issues that is often abused or misinterpreted, which has led to deep crevices in society’s structures, unused resources or indeed – as the migration crisis is still proving today – to a lost homeland, as indicated in the sentence. On the other hand, in the age of the 4th industrial-digital revolution and the generation shift we are witnessing a lack of dialogue, thought provocation and sentence formation. Can we tell why?
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