Field Of Teleportation

Nataša Galečič and Nemanja Nikolić

New technological media has been dramatically expending the limits and possibilities of human perception through a wide range of new mechanical and prosthetic capabilities, which further opens up a new regime of visual and aesthetic experience. Due to the excessive use of technical devices, individuals in our society are accustomed to perceiving the world through a technological lens, in which everyday narratives have been converted into a series of calculated and controlled algorithms. These mediated images of the world, imposed by dominant features of contemporary technological culture, introduce us to a new field of illusion as well as passive ways of processing information. Consequently, our multi-sensory capacities of imagination have been turned into passive visual journeys and our eyes have become less correspondent to the rest of our body. What this exhibition explores is how psychological and emotional units of time can be transferred from the state of fluidity and ephemerality to the field of passive experience and static action.

Nataša Galečić and Nemanja Nikolić are two artists who have a mutual need to initiate dialogue between their opposing positions as viewers and to share their travel experiences. This link was instrumental in creating this collaborative exhibition. Nemanja’s journey takes place in a film frame and it is governed by technical apparatus - his paintings are representations of his experiences as a movie watcher (movie examples Vertigo and North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock, The French Connection by William Friedkin). Instead of putting the spotlight on the movie content, Nemanja prioritises his personal movie watching experiences - above all its graphic rhythm. By doing so, he deconstructs the moving image and its audio-visual effects, and turns them into rhythmic codes and geometric forms.

In contrast to Nemanja’s passive journey, stands Nataša’s phenomenological travel through space. As a frequent traveler, who lives between two temporary places of residence, Nataša is often in the position of observer or visitor who is simultaneously a part of the system and/or simply passing through it. In those moments of mobility her body occupies the space imbued with quantities where a set of relations among things/cities creates her reality. In her installation work, Nataša aims to translate her visual travel notes (a constant tension between proximity and distance, the process of observing and occupying, of the eye and the land) into the rhythmic maps that convey the essence of the new world overwhelmed by fragments of information, and to show the condensed forms within which the contemporary human’s life is partitioned.

The strong link between the works of these two artists is evident in the mutual interest in reviewing the possibilities of painting, and a perception of it in the era of technology and global communication. For this exhibition, the artists intend to turn their visual correspondence into a spatial event, whose visual and conceptual facilities will further make room for multiple vectors of understanding the motifs such as time, rhythm, colour, distance, and visual record. By transporting personal experiences of the film and the city in the gallery space, Nemanja and Nataša open up a new zone for interactive and unexpected actions and reactions.