Touch of Yard

The book-building Zdravko Micanovic

Date: Opening on Monday 25 February 2013.
Location: Graphic Collective Gallery, Beograd, Obilicev venac 27
Duration: The exhibition will be open until 9 March.

 

Spooky scenes from the shadow theater Zdravko Micanovic

 
 

One of the most inspiring part of the famous writer and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, certainly is Damned Yard. Work in which the author describes the life of the prisoners in the notorious prison of Istanbul, the deepest place of the incarnation of human anguish and suffering. Many prisoners would be suffering the effects of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It seems that this universal story of human tragedy represents Andric’s vision and critique of society from his surrounding. Great writer transfers his observations wisely to the (almost heavenly conceived) Istanbul on whose periphery creates antagonistic (rough) world known as “Deposito”. These Andric`s concept of relocation issues and its contextualization in a parallel space of existence leads us to drawings Zdravko Micanovic.

This cycle of drawings literally is physically integrated into that work by making a specific theme in Micanovic illustrations. By the word of artists, illustrations  in their original form were not intended to serve as a dialogue with Andric’s book. Namely, these visual variations were carried out in a manner of automatism even before idea existed as a literar work. In the latter selection Micanovic divided his drawings, following the chapters of the book, into nine parts which are finally, conceptually and physically brought to a relational line text-drawing contribution. With its concept of illustration dialog flow with Andric text, Micanovic creates a special stage.

On this stage scenery became the text of the book, and on the proscenium ghostly figures are passing and become true actors of grotesque shadow theater (from which Andric gave the name of one of the main characters in the book). By establishing analogies between the text and the drawings the metaphorical names of acts are derived:
Prolog space; I Awakening; II Persons; III Longing; IV Recurrent; In exile; VI Touch; VII Creating; VIII Whirlpool; Epilogue – Is this the end?

One should be said that such process shaped non-traditional museum setting. Regarding previous, according to the Rastko Ciric, Andric’s work is seen as artifact, where the case is re-museumed through Zdravko Micanovic’s drawings. These drawings take on the role of the unpredictable guide through the gloomy stage of Damned Yard and the lives of its detainees, but also Andric’s Yard became a potential key for further interpretation of Micanovics works. By alchemical campaign a never ending circle is opened where end is no where in sight.