NEŽKA ZAMAR: (UN)TRUSTED SOURCE; A SERIES OF INVISIBLE PRACTICES |
Spatial installation | Loza Gallery Koper, 8.02.2024 – 5.05.2024 |
Opening: Thursday, 8.02.2024, at 6 p.m.
Nežka Zamar (1990, Šempeter pri Goric) is a promising interdisciplinary artist who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2013. She continued her studies in Visual Arts (Erasmus program) at the Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi in Istanbul, Turkey, and received her master's degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2018. Since 2012 she has participated in numerous residencies and has taken part in several projects, including the Albanian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016). So far she has presented her creations in international group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Albania, the State of Palestine, Latvia, Serbia and the United States. She lives and works between Vienna and Venice.
All of Nežka Zamar's projects are the result of research and different interpretations of her own responses to contemporary events, self-questioning and shifting the boundaries of identity and individuality. She creates them through contemporary artistic practices, depending on the space in which they are placed. All this is also reflected in the spatial installation and performance with the significant title (Un) Trusted Source, A Series of Invisible Practices at the Loza Gallery in Koper. The project is winner of the OPEN DOORS public call announced by the Coastal Galleries of Piran in 2023.
(Un)Trusted Source, A Series of Invisible Practices is a cross-disciplinary time-based project. Each of its chapters starts with on-site research, concludes with a documentary spatial installation, and focuses on the artistic process occurring between the two confining stages.
Following this structure, chapters independently target specific geopolitical problems reflected in micro phenomena using performance as the main artistic medium.
Operating collectively, they address the overarching multilayered concept of representation and perception’s relation to the former. The artwork draws from representation as a concept in art theory to address it in society – in an interspace where the concept and the medium become interchangeable through trans-disciplinary approach.
In (Un)Trusted Source, A Series of Invisible Practices, performance as a medium acts as a structural intersection. Intrinsically tied to research and documentation, the outset and the outcome, it abandons the role of the protagonist, and it develops behind the scenes. Stemming from everyday indicators of discrimination, the chaptered performative acts set themselves in dialog with the environment, challenging the unfounded value discrepancies in society.
The performative acts are executed outside the white cube and as a direct response to the surroundings. What we are used to perceiving as artistic value – and would arguably set aside as a performative act from an act of daily routine – is lost in translation.
(Un)trusted Source, A Series of Invisible Practices ultimately interacts with the audience through the conclusive presentation of independent spatial installations. Although composed of evidential fragments functioning as three-dimensional essays, the installations fail to provide a direct link proving the performance occurred.
Existing in the void caused by the lack of representation, this project lingers between fiction and reality, and it is in this exact space that it questions how we interpret events based on their portrayal. It challenges the audience to interrogate the importance we apply to what occurs according to how it was depicted and who it was depicted by.
Chapter I
During the three consecutive years of the artist’s stay in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, the Yugoslavian born Slovenian artist performs Ramadan fasting.
Nežka Zamar
