Lana Požlep, Ironic ending of a common language
12 January – 7 February 2023
P74 Gallery
>exhibition view @P74 Gallery
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Lana Požlep works mostly within the medium of video and photography, often expanding the latter into fresh and innovative spatial layouts. She is interested in different spaces and non-spaces – in their multifacetedness, characteristics, laws, and meanings created within them. Several of her projects focus on the construction site as a repeatable and temporary space of transformation.
Lana Požlep’s new project, Ironic ending of a common language (2022), created for the exhibition at P74 Gallery, explores her relationship to the medium, which began to be reflected in her irritation with her own photographs – as a result, she repeatedly tried to translate them into the physical form of a construct. In that process, the photos gradually began to disappear, recede into the background, and give way to objects made of plaster, silicone, and soap. Their shape, material, colour, and size, assumed the role of photography. They build a new interpretation, a new world, and represent all the flaws that the author noticed in the original images captured by the camera. The spatial layout of the exhibition thus primarily represents the process of exhibiting and building new images and the new relationships. Some of the objects return back to their original form (a photograph), while others stop before the end of their beginning and attempt to be more than they were – they try to be a physical upgrade of the visual as a new experience. This process allows us to observe how the author moves from one image and medium to new ones, which also enables a new perspective. Switching between media highlights their different properties, which also dictates the viewer’s observation and experiences. We could say that for the artist, the camera is no longer that which opens the door of the chosen space; instead, it is the process, the search for the possibility for the desired representation, that makes this possible. Experimentation plays an important role in all of this.
The exhibition is part of the “Youth” series – a professional presentation of artists of the younger generation, which is one of the important program orientations of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute.
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Lana Požlep (2000, Celje) is currently completing her undergraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, with a major in visual communication design – photography. She spent the last few months on a student exchange program at Umprum – Vysoká škola umeleskoprumyslová in Prague. Her work mostly features the media of photography, video, and installation. She presented her work at several student group exhibitions and participated in the exhibition Appointment 6.0. (DobraVaga), as well as in the exhibition Premiere (Centre for Contemporary Arts, Celje, 2022). She has also collaborated with the performance group IvAnKe (2020). She is the recipient of the University of Ljubljana / Faculty of Social Sciences Award for outstanding achievements and cooperation in the field of extracurricular activities 2021 for the project Dojeti AT Rog (To Understand the Autonomous Factory Rog, 2006-2021). As a photographer, she participated in the photo documentation of the Trigger Festival (2021) and Soteska Open (2021), in collaboration with Hana Vodeb in the field of video production for the Spider Festival (2022), and in the Young Lions Festival (2021, 2022). She has also participated with the Glej theatre and Siti theatre in the performance documentation processes and has worked on the photo documentation of the preparations for the exhibition Always & Forever (2020) at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Celje.
