Whole Red, Black Hole

Documentation from solo exhibition, Bryan Burford Gallery, University of Iowa, 2005

Documentation from solo show "Poetics of Incongruity", MKC (Multimedia Cultural Center) Gallery, Split, Croatia, 2010

Nadija Mustapić
2005

Two-channel video installation
SD video, NTSC, color, 4:3, loop

Dimensions variable: 3 screens hang in space, dimensions of each: 215cm x 153cm, two projections onto two lateral screens

Installation description:
Three hand made screens hang vertically in space at same height, 50-100 cm apart. They are made of paper, clay and acrylic media and have a very visceral quality, resembling hide or skins.
Two videos are projected simultaneously onto the two lateral screens, which are perforated with bullet holes, which enable for the projection light to pass through the holes onto the middle screen. Both videos show the author in act of drawing a Vitruvian Man looking figure: on one side she is shooting guns to make bullet holes that form the figure, and on the other she uses different colored markers to connect the dotted holes into the same figure.
The sounds of weapons shooting and markers squeaking from both ends on the installation create for the viewer a physically disturbing and emotionally intensified experience, while what consequentially happens on the middle screen – solely a physical manifestation of light that pushes through, the shimmering light constellations that form a human figure – allows for a silent and hopeful momentum for the viewer.
By choosing to enter the installation from one end or the other, the narrative is constructed by a different sequence.

Artist statement:
Deconstruction as construction, fiction in non-fiction, ethics of aesthetics and other seemingly contradictive terms which immediately imply their suffix “and vice versa” have become my passwords into exploring issues of identity and beauty in relation to intimate and socio-political narratives.
The abstract body in this piece is being cyclically fragmented, mapped out and partitioned in territories of different colors, shot at, constructed, destructed and reconstructed, and still, by or despite the actions of these vulnerably expressive gestures, speaks of beauty.

 

Exhibitions: 

– November 5th – 19th, 2010- MKC Gallery, Split, Croatia, solo show: “Poetics of Incongruity”
– June 2008 – 4th Croatian Drawing Triennial, Gliptoteka, Zagreb, Croatia, group exhibition, drawing installation, three hand made perforated screens were exhibited, without video projections
– November 2007,- “60 + 1 Extended Media”, curators: Nataša Ivančević, Ksenija Orelj, Gallery Kortil, Rijeka, Croatia, group exhibition
– May 2005 – Byron Burford Gallery, Iowa City, The University of Iowa, solo show: “Whole Red, Black Hole”