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VANJA BUČAN
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We proudly present the artist Vanja Bučan as the newest addition to our gallery.
In her photographic work, she explores our ambivalent relationship to nature ruled by domination, exploration, and, paradoxically, its idealisation. In the anonymous portraits and still lifes, Bučan strives to create a complex and a deconstructed vision of nature. Her works are never what they seem at first sight, but always contain layers of meaning. Sometimes critical, sometimes humorous but always profoundly intelligent.
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LOOKING FOR SADIQ
This work is a contemplation of my travel through Morocco. It is a sort of non conformist travel diary, with images displaying some representative local landscapes and my intentional transformation or deconstruction of the images. Morocco is an ancient land and I always expected I am going to discover something new and mystical around the next corner. However, despite its breathtaking landscapes one cannot overlook traces of violent environmental pollution, mountains of plastic for example. This problem however doesn't replace one's sense of self in the magical landscapes and irreplaceable silence of the desert. Looking for Sadiq means literally looking for a friend. Sadiq means friend in arabic language, and is a memory of our friend that took us to the dessert.
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CONCRETE FLOWERS
"My work Concrete Flowers is a recreation of an urban experience from my recent trip to China, in 2019. I made street photography in Shanghai and Lishui, and have transformed the images with my usual photographic practice, once I returned to Europe. I added new symbolic layers to the original imagery , in order to create an altered experience of the urban jungle, where concrete and vegetation coexist. By adding flowers, paper distortions,symbolic objects, I created a feelling of a parallel urban space, a personalised ecosphere, a sort of surreal travelogue.The presence of humans is accentuated with human hands."
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SEQUENCES OF TRUTH AND DECEPTION
The photographs in the series Sequences of Truth and Deception as playful sketches of our conditional and “exotic” love of nature. In contradiction to the incessant pollution inflicted by the contemporary way of life on our planet, many people still demonstrate various actions of minimal concern for the environment (i.e. planting trees, recycling, caring for endangered species, etc.), which only insignificantly affect our dire environmental reality. This series demonstrates this duality between our domination over nature and, on the other hand, our romanticisation of it. You could view Sequences of Truth and Deception as the author’s allegory of anthropocentrism, where it is difficult to discern whether the photographs depict love or domination. The series successfully introduces Bučan’s concept of “imaginary personal ecologies” through abstraction and various metaphors, where human presence is suggested only through isolated body parts, which in ambivalent settings enact various conceptual “situations”.
VANJA BUĆAN
Past viewing_room
