Waste _ Siniša Ilić
installation view, 2nd Industrial Art Biennial, “On the Shoulders of Fallen Giants” and curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW. at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Opening 19 - 21.07.18.
Performers in the video:
Jelena Lopatić, Dušan Barbarić
Director of photography and editor:
Karlo Čargonja
This work deals with the representation of life and choreographies of life during the period of the industrial and capitalist development of the city of Rijeka, as well as during the present moment. The selection of historic works from the collection (drawings and paintings from the Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Rijeka, produced between 1930 and 1945) is split into two parts. The first contains paintings that portray the landscape of economic development: the industrial plants that form the basis of everyday life, architecture and middle-class life, affirming the dynamic international climate and the transitional character of the city. They are counterposed to drawings on paper, structured in a fragile manner, and in a smaller format, drawn with a pencil, brush, or using the gouache technique. The drawings display the margins of industrialization: poverty, the time before and during work, banalities and stereotypes, scenes of daily life, the family and its rituals. The non-narrative videos and drawings, which were produced as an integral part of this work, stage and reinterpret the problems and atmospheres in the collection’s works, translating them into paintings and situations of loneliness and fatigue, brought forth by the experience of today’s postindustrial, digital present. The mechanism that sparks the dynamic of the workspace takes the museum’s inventory so as to create a hybrid ambient, a scenography of objects bereft of their initial function. The space, figures, paintings and performances that we follow through the dramaturgy of this work question the conventions of life in the industrial and the postindustrial eras, as well as their crises, that of a hundred years ago and the crisis of today.
S.I.
