Stille Nacht – dedicated to S. Beckett

Curator: Nikola Šuica
Artists: Marija Ćalić, Vana Urošević & Zoran Todović

Joining venture "Stille Nacht" by artists of South Slavic origin is an ambient collection that derives from a unique geopolitical insecurity and ever-changing examinations of relations. It gathers the diverse media of prints and photography, as well as quite light objects on silk and embroidered line outs. They make an effective thread in which the ideas of freedom and testimonies of ordeals of survival reflects Beckett’s responses to the world. Following artworks have a distinctive object related position, in its visuals, whether in two- or three-dimensions character that capture the vivid or obscure sensations of life.

“Silent Night" (German: "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht") as a popular Christmas carol composed in 1818, directs its title significantly beyond signs of miracle and religious hope of any sacred dedication. Beckett, an avid Schubert piano player, often transferred the notion of the ‘night’ as an atmospheric uncertainty principle, not just in ‘Waiting for Godot’ (quote: ‘Night is lurking’) or in references as such in a novel ‘Molloy’ and diverse monologues along his prose.

Vana Urošević and Zoran Todović are oriented into a corporeal motif of body that sensually strives as a main human tool of a hand. It is coupled with a fine arts perennial theme of a portrait head that happens to be diversified into stages of the Beckett’s face in diverse temporal procedures. Embroidery and sewing of lines of facial features as well as along ‘gloves’ of hands as objects, an enlarged palm and fingers articulated veins and arteries make a different sort, removed from a theatrical prop and a masque-like essence of human exposure.

Marija Ćalić photographs in the mode of collage structures that make spatial assemblies of lurking and darkened ambiences. Occasionally there is a featured human presence, a figure of a lonely elder man, possibly a vagrant character, an artist dressed as a clown. His ruminations along paradoxes of material overload and unknown parts of in-cohesive world build up a transformation patterns and dynamic changes from the missing narration. These ‘Nacht stimmung’ photographic prints combine real locations with their possible oneiric background. They do, as a created visual world react to Beckett’s confessional observations. Rhythms of syntax and association possibly lead to passages of ‘Unnameable’, ‘Krapp’s last tape’, ‘Godot’, ‘Molloy’, ‘Texts for nothing’ or ‘Endgame’. Variety of tonal and visual differences in a corrosive / crumbling material is involved, as well as in the uncanny expression of the self. Works for this kind of ‘Stille Nacht’ can be recognized not just in the legacy of Samuel Beckett, but as a much-needed assembly drawn from memory, nostalgia, art history and popular everyday culture. Employing a variety of media, three artists somehow transform commonplace objects, materials, textures, and viewpoints into viscerally haunting structures.
–Nikola Šuica