Offering to Memory

performance, light and sound installation 

installation view April Meetings, SKC, Belgrade 2002

photo © Srđan Veljović

Premonitioned Power

Jovana Komnenić’s first individual exhibition “Offering to Memory” is a continual matrix for recorded but unseen ritual of sacralization of the disappearing traces of memory. The author is sitting at the table most of the day, Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonata from “Musical Offering” in the air, in a darken space with just a lamp and pieces of papers and drawings, written and collected souvenirs and ephemeral proofs of existence.

In a shallow tin tub on the floor, dipped in water with occasional, additional different dish of more water poured in, there is a video cassette representing the recorded happenings from the past and some more hand-written papers and drawings which aim at water as basic element and the author let dissolving be the principle of releasing the material of memory.

With this installation and the time it lasts during the whole day, the questions of forgetting appear and this ‘sacrifice’, dipping memories into the water not accidentally lit by red light, the composer and his music and the author being her own master of the ceremony are correlated in a conceptual monument of European tradition, a rarity on contemporary Belgrade art scene – the phenomena of alternative and official, the cosmic synchronization of transient and accelerated forgetting…

Nikola Šuica for Radio Belgrade, Third Channel “Hronika”, april 2002