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Renata Poljak: All One Knows
In her new work- a two-channel video-installation with soundscape (by Ramuntcho Matta) Renata Poljak takes the risk of walking on an emotional tightrope, traveling from Belgrade to Vokovar with a companion, whereby she discovers herself as “Croatian”, an identity which she had never explicitly adopted.
The artist perceives her environment, both surprised and overwhelmed by her own “incorrect”, because suddenly nationalist, feelings. Due to their inability to adequately address their emotions the two travelers comment on their immediate impressions gathered in the course of this journey. They look for explanations for what has happened, the war between Serbia and Croatia, and for relevant traces. But explanations are nowhere to be found, not in Belgrade, nor in Vukovar. What they find instead is people’s alarming suppression of history and memory.
This episode is juxtaposed to the projection of an arguing couple, whereby the same patterns and unresolved conflicts – ultimately trivial matters– repeatedly lead to ferocious disputes. Renata Poljak merges the borders between the personal and the fictional, and so creates a position which allows her to develop and tackle suppressed issues and the trauma of being unable to talk.
In the publication accompanying the exhibition, the critic Nataša Ilić writes: „In the period of the current ideology of “normalization”, which acts in the field of the symbolic and the production of meaning producing consensus and consent, nationalism as a specific mechanism of social cohesion has been replaced by political correctness as dictated by integration processes to the European Union, that promised goal of normalization. But social tensions have not been resolved, only suppressed by a promise of “normalcy” to which the “Western states of late capitalism”, as welfare states in which human rights are fully respected, are supposedly close. Normalization today serves to legitimize liberal capitalism and the political system of parliamentary democracy and free market as the only natural and acceptable solution, the optimal norm of political consciousness, and all its traumatic consequences—unemployment, poverty, widening of class differences, degradation of the education system, decrease of social and health security, conservative backlash etc., have not been understood as a regular product and symptom of the liberal-capitalist system, but as mere “side-effects.” “All One Knows” does not produce a politically correct and highly functional, aesthetic suggestion of non-conflicting transition towards a liberal ideal of equalizing multicultural sociability, and it reacts to the frustrating situation of false dilemmas between the “European way” and “local extremisms” with a gesture that opposes the entrapping mechanisms of normative coding that create a community in which all voices tend to be absorbed into the homogenous black hole.“
Renata Poljak was born in 1974 in Split, Croatia, and now lives and works in Vienna.
All One Knows (2006) was comissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
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Type of programme: exhibition
Lasting time: 05.02.2007. - 02.03.2007.
