9 February – 2 March 2021
P74 Gallery
The exhibition In Some Places is the first presentation of the work of Isidora Todorić, a representative of the youngest generation of visual artists. Her works are accompanied by a constant questioning of the (ontological) status of art. Perhaps her constant change of media and the various forms of materiality she exploits are also directly related to her self-questioning about the status and identity of the work of art.
Her works, especially the latest projects, can be understood in terms of content in the context of specific issues (e.g., ecology), but the pieces are not directly engaged or critical. She asks herself questions to which she has no answers, and she is all the time accompanied by her contemplations on the purpose of artistic activity. The final form of the creative process is often seemingly simple, ordinary, or as a reproduction of models of relations present in everyday life and reality. The early work White (2017/18) is an eloquent example of dealing with the medium of painting and materiality. It consists of white canvas dipped in white paint. What is a painting? The basic combination of the two materials that make it up – canvas and paint. Before we combine them, they are fluid, flexible, and then they become a solid object. Wet and coloured canvas was exposed in different ways, in different final forms. All give the impression of softness and emphasize the fluidity of the material. Exteriors (2017/18) is a project that can be placed on the transition between dealing with the media itself and opening up broader issues. It is about sculptures, objects of irregular shapes made of masonry plaster. These are casts of the interior of cracks that appear in the ground. On these casts, the author left the soil that remained on them during extraction. Under the right conditions, plants can grow on these sculptures, turning them into an active, living organism. From this point on, Isidora Todorić is intensively devoted to mapping spaces, or documenting nature (plants) in selected spaces in her works. She puts herself in the role of an observer. Just as in the beginning she observed mainly the medium and its laws, now she observes space and its specifics. She selects and archives what she finds worth preserving. In her latest project, Herbarium (2020), she creates an archive of the life of the third landscape – she collects plants that grow in spaces that are excluded from the human community and inhabited by nature (for example, a construction pit). In doing so, she also observes herself in the role of the artist and what her gestures, made in the context of art, mean. How can we translate everyday activities into art and how do they affect the real, in themselves or in the context of art, if at all? She is interested in the ways in which she can, through systematic documentation, collect what has the potential to later turn out to be the only possible reference to something that was an (artistic) activity or an (artistic) intervention in everyday life.
______
Isidora Todorić (1995, Ljubljana) completed her undergraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, at the Department of Painting, course of Video and New Media. She also studied at the Political School for Artists, BLOK, Zagreb (2018), Creative Critical Laboratory: Feminist Theories and Practices, Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb (2018), 10. Curatorial Platform: Performative Case Studies, KNAP, Zagreb (2018), Kunst Marx Seminar, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana (2019). She participated in the 2nd International Student Biennial, Osijek (2017), where she received the first award, and in the exhibition of the award-winning works of the 2nd International Student Biennial, Zagreb (2018).
