Installation of the statue in the Municipality of Ankaran |
Ištvan Išt Huzjan: Social Platform, Forma Viva Portorose 2023 |
Ankaran, Memorial Park, Thursday, June 13, 2024, at 5 p.m.
On Thursday, June 13, 2024, the Piran Coastal Galleries will hand over to the Municipality of Ankaran a sculpture called Social Platform, which was created by the Slovenian artist Ištvan Išt Huzjan at last year's international symposium Forma Viva 2023. This is already the second sculpture that was created for the Municipality of Ankaran at the sculpture symposium. Representatives of the Piran Coastal Galleries and the Municipality of Ankaran, as well as the author of the sculpture, chose a green area in the Memorial Park on the doorstep of Ankaran for its permanent installation.
The creative threads of the international symposium Forma Viva, on its 60th anniversary three years ago, also reached the youngest municipality in Istria. Then, in Ankaran, we welcomed the elegant stone work called Elementum, which was sculpted by the Portuguese artist Mario Lopes for the Municipality of Ankaran. We placed it on the green at the entrance to the city center of Ankaran, from where it greets locals and visitors every day.
Soon, the locals and visitors of Ankaran will be addressed by another stone creation. It was sculpted at last year's Forma Viva symposium by Ištvan Išt Huzjan, a sculptor from Ljubljana who graduated from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. He titled the Ankaran sculpture Social Platform and emphasized that it is intended for the interaction of the observer with the work of art and for the reflection on the coexistence of man and nature.
Curator of the Coastal Galleries of Piran Majda Božeglav Japelj explained that the author intervened in the 16-ton block of Istrian Yellow stone “with minimal interventions, but with a clear idea; to create a statue with architectural elements. The masterfully carved stairs on one of the longer sides of the sculpture are not just an elegant geometric play of regular cuts and smoothed surfaces, they are intended to overcome the height difference between the ground and the upper plateau, which reveals the rough structure of the natural material. This radical formal gesture allows the sculpture to be transformed into an object with elements of architecture, which stands out for its simplicity and also its extremely effective multifaceted meaning".
By placing the sculpture in the Memorial Park, which is already marked by a memorial, both the author and the Municipality of Ankaran and the Piran Coastal Gallery wish to emphasize the importance of public space as a common good, in which contact with art is also possible. Sculptural interventions in the open space allow a completely different experience of works of art, and above all they are offered as a generator of a new collective consciousness about a more responsible relationship between man and nature. Ultimately, this creates and strengthens the identity of the place itself.
