Timescape, Vranyczany Palace (HIS), Zagreb
16.2.-10.3. 2023, curator: Irena Bekić in collaboration with Marijana Stanić
Organisation: Art Pavilion Zagreb and Contemporary Art Platform, Gallery 90-60-90
The artists uses the space as found with it’s visible traces of devastation by the earthquake. The craks on the wall have been additionaly penetrated by probes for the purpose of expert assesments of the state of the building. With a minimal luminous intervention, the artists marks the fissures im wich the historical strata have become present and relates us to deep geological time.
(excerpt from the curatorial text by Irena Bekić)
Neli will draw particular attention to this relation of the body to space and time in her work Deep Time. She enters the found space with visible traces of devastation from the earthquake: cracks in the walls, damaged plastering, investigative probes, indexed layers. Just as she is attentive towards migrant passengers at the station, she approaches the space here with the same deep empathy. She does not use it as a stage set, nor does she exploit it, but takes it over as a structure that she activates with minimal intervention. With a discrete light animation, she marks the crevices in which the historical layers became present, as well as the tectonic movements of the earthquake, and uses light to write a denomination “El tiempo profundo” (“Deep Time”). The slow circular journey of light, reminiscent of the movement of the planets, is a gesture of tending the wound, tenderness, care and healing. If there really is little else than can be done, we should at least slow down and make ourselves permeable to the other.
(excerpt from the catalogue text by Irena Bekić: If We Lose the NOW, When Will We Stand up?)