Babylon the Great

On ephemeral consequences of Ivana Ivković’s art

Ana Bogdanović, art historian

The practice of Ivana Ivković develops around a constant dialogue with the personal, emotional experience of the artist and is based on examining and reassessing not only the lived and tangible experience, but also the experience located in the domain of desired, imaginary and unfulfilled, thereby posing a question about the complexity of intimacy as a space of exposure and hiding, enjoying through the other and discovering loneliness. And even though one may assume that her intentions lay in the direction of conducting psychoanalytical observations, Ivana Ivković does not appear as someone who diagnoses different states of the psyche, allowing the unconscious to speak through images. Taking a different perspective on observing and recognising of the intimate, she creates images and ambiances that offer fragile, often ephemeral situations through which the sequences of intimate experiences are reconstructed and revived as staged events. She achieves the effects of fragility and transience in these ambiances by the process of monumentalizing and theatralization of drawing, which is the foundation and the central medium of her artistic activity. Ivana Ivković treats drawing in a twofold manner: as a space for sketching the experience of intimacy, in which the drawing functions as an independent result of her artistic practice, and as an initial draft for further transposition of this media’s competences into three-dimensional space where she creates objects, ambiances and performative situations, including both the performers as well as the audience as their protagonists.

Ivana Ivković addresses the above-mentioned questions in the exhibition Babylon the Great by exploring the male body as a central motif and a performative instrument that she, in various ways, orchestrates through scenes and in different relations within the exhibition space. The works presented at this exhibition are related to her project Lines, Rows, Columns (Dormitory), which was performed during the 56th October Salon in 2016.

She is using the segments of this ambient installation through photographic documentation that serves as a starting point, i.e. a visual pretext for the creation of large-scale tapestries, which are placed on the gallery walls. Scenes and visual fragments from the previously created installation with performative character are transferred into a woven image and complemented by text that additionally complicates the possible meanings of the artist’s gesture, simultaneously indicating the continuous self-reflection as a constituent element of her practice. The culmination of Ivković’s examination into the persistent interest for the feeling of intimacy, which is performed by means of denuding the tangible (physical) body, and through it the concealed (emotional) state as well, occurs in the center of the exhibition architecture where the scenes from the tapestries are being embodied in the space, recreating the performative environment in which the bodies participate in an orchestrated event of a monumental structure with ephemeral consequences.