>
Exhibition - "HERE - THERE" -Tomislav Hršak
[DateFrom]:
21.09.2019
7 pm, Gallery Flora
Exhibition -

Here – There

It is strange how images fly in front of our eyes when we think about the moment before, and the moment before that, and the moment from a long time ago, when the hands were softer. The sunrays are flickering, our eyes are closing. Winter. A friend’s smile. A shadow. A movement in the grass, a blink of the eye, another piece of plaster, and then a flash, and a blink again.   Time is an elementary, furious creature that consumes everything we have experienced; it modifies corporeality, without allowing for corrections. The streams of philosophical thinking about the nature of time observe it on the one hand as a part of real and fundamental structure of the universe and dimension irrespective of the events that appear and disappear within it. One the other hand, though, time is just a segment of man’s intellectual apparatus, a way human consciousness perceives and interprets the events and intervals that separate them. But even though the arrow of time undoubtedly and ruthlessly rushes forward, the mechanics of human memories, broken into fragments by the prisms of emotions and oblivion, is more like a loop consisting of moments, flashes connected with the ticking, with people (foreign and familiar), and a collection of movements and matter.   In his multimedia installation Here – There, through video flashes and objects arranged around the space, Tomislav Hršak contemplates his own time. He views it in isolated moments, in the intertwinements of reality and memory, interpreting the nature of human psyche and its perception of ever flowing life. The installation consists of a video whose fragments were filmed with a mobile phone, over the period of eight years, and then fitted into a sequence of moments/observations important to the artist. The fragments are connected into a dreamlike whole interrupted by blackness, thus reminding of a languid closing and opening of eyelids, separating one memory from another. In a nonlinear sequence Hršak arranges the moments of reality that seems to be everything but real; these are dreamy, idle, dissolved fragments of memories, put into motion by a clockwork mechanism of emotions, lining up and entwining with each other in a spatial and temporal discontinuity. From teetering, almost entirely monochromatic frames, emerge human beings full of life, captured in one of their moments, whirling cats, warm eyes of loved ones, a ticking clock, strangers on a street, snow in tree crowns, at times abstract, at times so clear, melancholic, contemplative. In this vertiginous movement of dreamlike sequences, in the center, lies a circle as the immovable aspect of cyclical time, and a leitmotif of a palm tree, as a witness and goddess of his own symbolic lexicon. Here the palm tree becomes a woman, the concept of love in the artist’s life, existing as a memory from the video, with plants whose branches and filamentous leaves reflect the rays of light from the video projector.  Along with the palm tree as the dominant matter in the space, Hršak entwines the shadows of objects “extracted” from the video, placing them as obstacles to the image from the projector. By doing so, he blends the moments in real time with moments from the past, interweaving reality and its interpretation into a whole that is joined with the circular flow of time.    The movement of collective and individual times is perhaps linear in the way it crosses from one moment to another, but it becomes circular and eternal when we make it our own, as soon as it imprints itself in the growing curve between the beginning and the end, between now and then.

—Marija Kamber

TOMISLAV HRŠAK was born on 10 June 1992 in Zagreb. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, graduating in 2017.THe is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists. He took part in the following group exhibitions (selection): 13th Triennial of Croatian Sculpture, Gliptoteka HAZU, Zagreb; 34th Youth Salon, Panoptikon, HDLU Center, Zagreb; Solo exhibitions in 2019: Suppressed in Vagueness, Zilik gallery, Karlovac; 2018; Life, Šira gallery, Zagreb; Another Center of Circumstances, Bačva gallery, Zagreb; Tirquise Tension, Zagreb State Archives, Zagreb; 2017; Temporary, VN gallery, Zagreb; Center of Circumstances, The French Pavillion, SC, Zagreb; Siti Kapa Rano Sata Šoja,  Kamba Garage, Zagreb.standing inside and outside, simply existing. Hršak takes the palm tree out of its context and observes it as the motif.

Hello dear Visitor!

Tell us what you think about your stay in Dubrovnik!

Take the poll
Knez1