Photo: Lucija Klauž
16 January – 6 February 2024
P74 Gallery
You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition i never return to the same place, every time i trip over something else (shall i describe where i am? i see trees and railway tracks. but maybe this was yesterday.) by Lucija Klauž on Tuesday, 16 January 2024, between 7pm and 9pm at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana.
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The first part/version of the i never return to the same place, every time i trip over something else project could already be seen at the Ljubljana’s Academy of Fine Arts and Design students’ show at the end of the 2023 winter semester. In that setup, Klauž combined photography and video. Content-wise, she was interested in how to (re)create a sense of nostalgia in connection to time and space. While the first three executions of the project, which (as we can see from the continuation of the title) are based on processuality, the latest one is made with a greater emphasis on the exhibition space. The latter is determined by a representative element that is key to creating images that are the starting point for the entire project. The artist took the photos on which the project is based on the road, from the train window with a mobile phone.
The digital interface and magnification bring her view closer to the distant landscape, thereby removing the captured images from the whole, while insignificant, unplanned phone movements take away control over their final image. The moment the shutter is pressed is never chosen by the artist. The set of photos we follow as a series in the video ceases to be a document of what is seen, and this is enhanced by the insertion of the images into various software for stitching panoramas, the organisation of which is left to the computer software. This produces a shift from spatial to temporal sequence. The original documentation of the journey and the landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, moving further and further away from the real landscape. The artist’s reorganisation of the primary material tests possible ways of reconstructing the space she passes. These mechanisms of material manipulation and new ones are present in the project’s current phase, as will be shown at the exhibition, but this time with an expanded set of images. The current spatial arrangement does not place a projection as the centre; instead, it uses several (different) television screens arranged as a mental pattern and, simultaneously, a map of the creative process (and, ultimately, a documented journey). Additional treatments of an image and additional technology cycles potentiate the fragmentation and deconstruction of the photos, countered by a reversal – a return to the video that clearly shows the journey and is a (virtual) documentary representation of what is seen. How do these images live and act, and what does this manufactured nostalgia bring about?
Despite her attempts to remove herself from the space and the dynamics of movement, Lucija Klauž is increasingly faced with the fact that she is unavoidably included in them – her gaze and her body are the ones that are inside the given, mediated space. The resulting installation is a set of experiments within the space-time-memory relationship that create a fragmented ambience. We can look for potential connections between individual experiments, where the emphasis travels in different directions; the levels of spatiality and temporality and what is personal and distant vary. Can nostalgia be created without a basis in real memory and/or personal if one tries to completely withdraw from the impulse that makes a sense of nostalgia based on reality?
The exhibition is part of the »Youth« series – a professional presentation of artists of the younger generation, one of the vital program orientations of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute.
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Lucija Klauž (1999) is an artist and critic, student of photography at Academy for fine arts and Design in Ljubljana. She is interested in recording time and space through the documentation of the surroundings with random gestures that eventually turn into procedures. She prefers to focus on these on the road when she looks at them through the window of a moving vehicle or the screen of a poorly functioning digital device. She is interested in uneven speeds and low-resolution images. Her work has been presented in the solo exhibitions Observatory (Portal 27778, 2022), and I never return to the same place, every time I trip over something else (This usually means that one or more images do not belong to the set) (DobraVaga Gallery, 2023), and in several group exhibitions, including at residencies SobaZaGosteMaribor in Maribor (2023), in Tunis as part of the Light Art Project Interference, at the Lichtkunst Projekte Goldstücke in Gelsenkirchen-Buer, and the Triennial of Young Artists at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Celje, at the Lighting Guerrilla Festival, in DobraVaga Gallery and Cirkulacija 2 (all in 2022).
