Sara Salamon: Life Is Full of Meaning | exhibition @ Galerija Filodrammatica, October 6-28, 2022

Exhibition opening. Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

Set in the Filodrammatica Gallery (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka), solo exhibition by Sara Salamon brings together works created over the past two years as a continuation of the Archaeological Excavations series, this time gathered under the name Life Is Full of Meaning.

The opening is scheduled for Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 8 p.m., after which the exhibition can be visited until October 28, from Monday to Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m. (contact us to arrange another time of your visit). Admission is free.

NEW: on Monday, October 17, at 4:30 p.m., the artist will hold a public tour of the exhibition.

The exhibition continues with recent works that articulate an unstable atmosphere and tension in the relationship between the observer, space, objects and materials. The unstable atmosphere refers to the performativity of exhibition objects and installations, which most often perform barely perceptibly in front of the audience. At the thematic level, the exhibition deals with anticipation, collective mediated experience, witnessing and observation (a human being has seen your order). Anticipation is characterized by space-time uncertainty, invisibility of the source of discomfort, absence of the known, distorted known, distance.

Multimedia researches in various formats try to embody the aforementioned uncertain atmosphere and image, and include objects, ready-mades, moving images and light.

Archeological Excavations series are dealing with the “promise” and the “uncertainty” of the past and future – playing with viewers’ perception through interventions in public or gallery space. The research started as an event that transforms part of the public space between residential buildings into an “archaeological excavation” – an object with floodlights and building materials with a hidden excavation area, which daily travels slowly down the street (1m / day). The starting point for this research was the article ‘Millennia of human activity’: heatwave reveals lost UK archaeological sites published in The Guardian, in which, ironically, English tourism and science flourish under climate change and global warming.

In her work, Sara Salamon researches the methods of media betrayal. “The media” is here considered as any object, material and process that serves to transmit potential information or meaning – light, image, echo, body, history – while “the betrayal” designates actions beyond or in spite of the intended or declared function. On a thematic level, the artist is inspired by collective wilderness with underlying
atmosphere of uncertainty, in which she sees the potential to create a reality that is shifted. That false shifted reality is fiction; and the fiction is seemingly invisible. Politics and poetics emerge from “everyday life which-is-not”.

Dramaturgically, the key point of the work is the moment when we pass the excavations for the second time and notice that something is off in that scene. It is difficult, however, to admit to yourself that the excavations have moved. The affective register changes. The domestic comfort of cynicism or curiosity (two typical responses to a scene of archeological site in the public space) are replaced by “uncanny”, a shallow chill of dissonance – is the problem in me or in the reality?”

– Marko-Luka Zubčić