Ana Pečar: Ancestral views

Oct
2018

30 October, 2018
Epeka Gallery

You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition “Views of Ancestors” by Ana Pečar on Tuesday, 30 October 2018, at 7 pm.

Two tendencies have strongly influenced Ana Pečar’s work in recent years. The first involves research on the scattered and often forgotten or silenced remains of ancient beliefs. She has been researching these mainly in Posočje, where Old Believer traditions were still alive among some inhabitants of these remote places until the destruction of the World War. These customs and folk traditions have been collected by Pavel Medvešček over several decades, based on testimonies and material heritage, and only recently published in book form. The second tendency is often intertwined with the first, and comprises poetic visual meditations on the relationship between (modern) man and nature, and the gulf that increasingly yawns between them. Pečar does not approach these themes from a distance, but rather tries to get as close to them as possible and to break the divide between her own life and the artistic and existential questions that permeate her work. She moved to a sparsely populated area above the Soča River, where she lives and works in conditions that are in some ways not so far removed from those before the First World War. She is closely involved in the nature-urban dichotomy – on the one hand, she lives in primitive conditions and enters into an intimate dialogue with nature; on the other hand, she is still bound by the forces of contemporary artistic production, which require her to be present on the scene and to acquire the resources necessary to create and survive.
The exhibition Ancestral Views is a cross-section of the artist’s oeuvre, which was created during the period of her move from the urban environment to the remote nature. The works relate directly to nature and external reality, but at no point are they purely documentary, but become autonomous pictorial creations made with photographic means. The photographs show nature in its primordial state, emptied of direct human, indeed civilising, presence, but nevertheless by no means empty. In the skilfully framed forest sections, there is often a kind of horror vacui of raw nature, which is further emphasised by the strong diagonals and often flattened image space. This is emphasised by the veils of fog that close off the spatial planes, preserving only the silhouettes of the trees in the distance. Such landscapes evoke memories of romantic painting, which is deeply rooted in a shared cultural memory. But the artist breaks with this anthropocentric tradition by completely eliminating the human figure and focusing on the intangibility of nature. Most of the works have no clear centre, challenging the viewer’s gaze to wander across the pictorial surface or to try to penetrate the haze. On the other hand, those compositions that do have a clear centre place moss-covered rocks in place of the human figure. Thus, most of the elements that would provide a clear narrative structure are absent, but there is a strong sense that something is moving in the obscured parts of many of the photographs. It is almost as if something hidden is watching us from some of the works, but it is there nonetheless.
In this way, Pečar raises questions about the complexity of the human relationship to nature, which E.O. Wilson captured in his hypothesis of biophilia – the evolutionary tendency of humans to seek contact with life and life-like processes, but which does not exclude the presence of biophobia, i.e. negative feelings towards certain aspects of nature. In the works on display, Pečar skilfully uses visual approaches to evoke both sets of feelings. The compositions range from open, inviting the viewer into the pictorial space with soft lines and relative airiness, to closed and almost threatening, evoking feelings of discomfort associated with the unknown and the incomprehensible with their dark colour palette and visual barriers. Arne Næss, the founder of deep ecology, foresaw that it takes a certain period of time for man to become accustomed again to the natural milieu, from which we have critically departed during centuries of rapid development, before a full sensitivity to nature can develop again. Pečar has interwoven her life and artistic creation with an almost complete break from modernist modernity to the extent that she has reawakened a perception of nature that is almost unattainable for most of us who are immersed in modern lifestyles. However, this is precisely what enables her to provide an intuitive insight into the primal and complex relationship between man and nature, which is also reflected in the works on display. – Žiga Dobnikar

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Ana Pečar (1977) is an internationally acclaimed video and intermedia artist, who has been presented in numerous venues between 2015 and 2017, including a solo exhibition at the Kostanjevica Church of the Božidar Jakac Gallery and the Maribor Art Gallery Salon in 2016.In 2016, she was a lecturer at the Forum on Debt at the University of Bolzano, and in 2015 at the Social Inequality and the Arts Forum at the Royal College of Art, London.
In 2015 – 2017, she participated in numerous international exhibitions and festivals, including Shame on You, Celje Gallery of Contemporary Art; Kiblix 2015, 2016; Risk Change, Kibla; Spajalica, MSU Rijeka; Slovenian Film Festival; Epilogue – Space, Body and Medium in Transition, Novo Celje Manor; Far, So Close, 25th MAO Ljubljana Design Biennial.
She is the recipient of numerous scholarships, including a scholarship from the Government of the Austrian Styria in 2012, the Leon Levy Foundation in 2012, a working scholarship from the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia in 2012, a scholarship from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation 2015 (Berlin), and in 2017, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, she is living in a studio in Berlin.

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Photo by Zarja Belina