Worlds Within Worlds

(25.02.22 – 01.04.23)

Group show: Sophie Erlund, Igor Eškinja, Stephen Kent, Mark Požlep, Josep Maynou

Curated by: Jelena Tamindzija Donnart

Partners of the show: CCA Andratx, NOMAD Platform, Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, Croatian Association of Artists, Danish Arts Foundation (Statens Kunstfond), Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Goethe Institut, Hilton Imperial Dubrovnik

Getting out of the everyday context and setting out for the idyllic landscape-immersed CCA Andratx complex for a one-month residency enabled five artists to create a microcosm that accumulated experience of the world outside and permeated their artistic work. Leaving the regular quotidian did not refer primarily to the physical displacement of the artists who were assigned new studios of their own, but also to the element of the creation of a new form of communal living in which were interwoven discussions, communal suppers, meal preparation, getting hold of materials for artworks, thinking about one’s own artwork and delving into the mental worlds of the artworks of their studio-neighbours.

Sophie Erlund, Igor Eškinja, Stephen Kent, Mark Požlep and Josep Maynou here create their own Decameronish narration, which impinges, every day of the residency, ever more tightly, on the development of a fabula that unfolds at several levels. Fabula here does not flow linearly, its narrative consisting rather of fragments accumulated during extended evening conversations interrupted by the clinking of glasses and cutlery.

At a distance from their everyday life, the group of artists gathered together test out their own artistic practice during the residency where they will go deeper into new and already posed questions in their work. The objective of discussions in this group is not to look for and then propose answers, but in this separate heterotopia of artistic socialising to find new paths through which to ponder their own artistic practices and the issues they raise; from the question of the creation of the image and the hyperproduction of the visual in today's age in images of different techniques by Stephen Kent, recording moments in the process of the creation of visual diaries of Josep Maynou, in which the artist employs everyday objects, testing out our own perception of the space that surround us and in which we are living in the work of Igor Eškinja, the relation of object and man and the interrogation of his anthropocentric view in the sculpture, drawing and sound work of Sophie Erlund and issues of the production of new life situations in which we will lead ourselves into a new dimension of perception of reality in the videowork and drawings of Mark Požlep.

The artists put before themselves the task of mental journey into the uncertainty of the expanses of possible answers that are not necessarily the final landfall of the artists, but just a starting point for the building of new worlds.

The group of artists gathered together were participants in the residency project named “Artist meets Chef” at the hotel Adriatic, Rovinj, Croatia in 2017 and 2019. The exhibition will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik in April 2023, and at the Croatian Association of Artists in Zagreb, in September 2023. 

Kindly supported by: