Nadija Mustapić, 2011

Two-channel video/audio installation
PAL, color, loop, 2 x HD 1080p, 2 x stereo sound

Production specifications:
Editing: Nadija Mustapić
Camera: Toni Meštrović, Nadija Mustapić

 

An oneiric narrative is constructed within an actual space of the building where the author herself lives in. The building’s staircase is transformed into a habitat, where the unconscious finds its shelter. It is built out of material prevalent to psychoanalysis: a female protagonist is climbing a winding staircase, while alternately throwing and catching colourful flowers. But her climb is not linear: striving to catch the bouquet, which at her every capture appears in a different shape, she rushes downstairs to repeatedly climb upstairs holding this precious burden. Variations of bouquets that keep slipping from her hands represent a ritualistic reminder, a reminiscence of ceremonies that steer the course of a regular bourgeois life: an academic graduation, a wedding, birth of a child, and an array of anniversaries translated into short acts in such theatre of the unconscious.

The protagonist is presented in two video channels (one shows her in the interior of the building and the other from the outside looking in through the staircase windows) and structured as a double – at first we only see her feet in sandals, later her back, then we catch a glimpse of her profile line… The rhythm of her walk is followed by the visual rhythm of intermissions and reversions, digression of textures, wall surfaces, fence, glass, doors. The visual rhythm also defines transitions of light and viewing angles, and the back and forth movement on the spiral stairway, which has been reconstructed and edited into a labyrinthine structure.

The piece is partly inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of space”, in which the author argues that quotidian spaces of habitation become our spaces for daydreaming, the poetic spaces in which we inscribe our associations, memories and hopes. The title is taken from a verse by Rilke that speaks of longing for places that were not cherished enough in the fleeting hour and making good from far with the forgotten gesture – the additional act – which is in fact the poetic act, the act of surplus, an un-economic, trivial act, requiring additional effort. In this piece, the author materialises the metaphor of the journey with all its poetic and symbolic aspects. By emphasising the “additional act” Mustapić reveals the hidden, more tender levels of seeing, in which the most common and every-day details uncover concealed stories – cryptic and opaque, yet familiar.

 

 

Exhibitions:

– December 2nd-20th, 2011 – Gallery V. Bužančić, Zagreb, Croatia, solo exhibition
– July 30th – August 12th, 2013 – Every House is and Island, (solo exhibition, with Tonka Maleković), grey) (area Gallery, Korčula, Croatia (curated by Ivana Meštrov, Loose Assotiations)
– September 10th – 28th, 2013 –Dynamic Spaces of Rijeka (Group exhibition – Faculty show, Academy of Applied Arts 50th Anniversary, The university of Rijeka), MMSU- Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia
– November 8th-14th, 2014 – New Media Festival INTERFACE, group show, E-Bernardi, Rijeka, Croatia
– October 8th, 2015 – Videowall (with Toni Meštrović), one evening solo show, Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland