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Phantom Trades: Sea of People

Phantom Trades: Sea of People
2017

Installation composed of:
Phantom Trades: Sea of People I, self standing painting (acrylic and gouache on canvas, 175 x 270cm) on wooden frame, supported by steel legs (powdered coated in signal grey), enforced by 2 sculptural elements composed of pigment, concrete, glass, brick, stone and marble (50 x 60 x 30cm)

Phantom Trades: Sea of People II
, self standing painting (acrylic and gouache on canvas, 170 x 240cm) on wooden frame, supported by steel legs (powdered coated in signal grey), enforced by 2 sculptural elements composed of pigment, concrete, glass, brick, stone and marble (40 x 50 x 30cm)

Phantom Trades: Sea of People III, 6 paintings laying flat on the floor (overall size 155 x 250 x 35cm) with 2 sculptural elements composed of pigment, concrete, glass, brick, stone and marble (50 x 60 x 30cm and 40 x 50 x 30cm)

Dot in the Ocean, (HD video, 1’35’’ – loop) 2 LCD screens, metal frame, powder coated in signal gray (each 40 x 30 x 20cm)

Croatian Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennial
Curated by Branka Benčić
Venice, Italy
Photo: Damir Žižić

The project Horizon of Expectations takes the form of a double solo exhibition involving the production of new artworks developed specifically for the pavilion. It brings together two artistic positions that deal with issues of uncertainty, tension or collapse, and how they relate to different conditions and contexts.

Avoiding a fixed narrative depicting certain content, the exhibition creates a series of gaps, ruptures and interrelations, pointing to renegotiations and fractures as places of potential transformation and imagination.

Using different media, such as installation, animation, objects, painting, drawings and projections, Tina Gverović and Marko Tadić engage with conceptual procedures and subjective imagination inscribed in spatial and temporal discontinuities. The approach to display and the arrangement of materials in space consider the role of the observer, articulating its fluid, almost performative character of moving through the space.

The exhibition for the Croatian Pavilion titled Horizon of Expectations includes a complex and multifaceted installation by each artist: Phantom Trades: Sea of People by Tina Gverović and Events Meant to be Forgotten by Marko Tadić.

Tina Gverović creates works in the form of disorienting installations that engage with the space, territory and identity, and how these concepts are bound to imagination. Her images are fluid and fragile, oscillating between different conditions. In Phantom Trades: Sea of People an installation involving paintings and objects (developed in collaboration with artist Ben Cain), she explores different processes, history and materiality, bodies in transit, as moving masses or geopolitical entities.

Marko Tadić continues to explore his long-term interest in the legacy of modernism. Using found images and animation techniques to stage a narrative oscillating between document and fiction, Tadić unfolds a series of haunting visual sequences, based on a series of projected images including slide projections and 16mm film transferred digital video. Events Meant to be Forgotten acts as a panorama of achronological time, suspended between history, memory and future projections.

Borrowing the title from literary reception theory, the shifting “horizon of expectations” points to a platform of common experience, knowledge and understanding, framed by renegotiations and uncertain possibilities of identification.

Phantom Trades: Sea of People I-VIII
2017, acrylic and gouache on canvas
175 x 270cm, 170 x 240cm, 155 x 250cm, 100 x 150cm, 70 x 130cm, 60 x 100cm, 50 x 90cm, 50 x 70cm

Dot in the Ocean
HD video,1’35’’
(with Ben Cain)

Related content: Clemens Krümmel. Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea, text for the work Phantom Trades: Sea of People (Croatian Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennial)