Jelena Martinovic
16 Jan - 13 Mar 2010
JELENA MARTINOVIC
"Dimensional Narratives"
16 January - 13 March
Opening: 15 Jan 2010, 5 – 8 pm
The box is only temporary
At the age of seven Agnes, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s short story The Wishing
Box, dreamt of a land “above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking
very much like coffee-grinders.” One has to turn around the box nine times, while
speaking softly into the small hole on its side. Agnes believes that those immaterial
words confined in the enclosed space of the box, will make the wish come true, and
generate an event in the real space.
In Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, a 2-dimensional land where no material depth is
allowed, that box would be a square, like the novel’s narrator. Flatland, he writes,
is like “a vast sheet of paper” on which individuals, shaped as “straight Lines,
Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures” move around on the
surface, “but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like
shadows.” In this sense, as Giorgio Manganelli would later argue in a preface to the
novel, Flatland is a language, a place where we can be only by “accepting the
linguistic rules that limit it.”
For her project at Claudia Groeflin Galerie, Jelena Martinovic revolves around similar
narrative dimensions. Text unrolls on the corner of a straight-line-shaped carpet,
it disseminates over a pyramid of archive boxes and is arranged over fabric and
paper. Words are here presented as sculptural, dimensional narratives, activated
by visitors’ gazes – vertically, from the stairs, diagonally, across the gallery, and
horizontally, following the invisible strings that design the exhibition space – as
well as by their random walkabouts around the pieces. Through these crossing paths
and looks, words inscribed in the space, over heterogeneous surfaces and areas,
combine into temporary grids, lines, meanings, and meta/physical poe/try.
Federica Martini
"Dimensional Narratives"
16 January - 13 March
Opening: 15 Jan 2010, 5 – 8 pm
The box is only temporary
At the age of seven Agnes, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s short story The Wishing
Box, dreamt of a land “above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking
very much like coffee-grinders.” One has to turn around the box nine times, while
speaking softly into the small hole on its side. Agnes believes that those immaterial
words confined in the enclosed space of the box, will make the wish come true, and
generate an event in the real space.
In Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, a 2-dimensional land where no material depth is
allowed, that box would be a square, like the novel’s narrator. Flatland, he writes,
is like “a vast sheet of paper” on which individuals, shaped as “straight Lines,
Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures” move around on the
surface, “but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like
shadows.” In this sense, as Giorgio Manganelli would later argue in a preface to the
novel, Flatland is a language, a place where we can be only by “accepting the
linguistic rules that limit it.”
For her project at Claudia Groeflin Galerie, Jelena Martinovic revolves around similar
narrative dimensions. Text unrolls on the corner of a straight-line-shaped carpet,
it disseminates over a pyramid of archive boxes and is arranged over fabric and
paper. Words are here presented as sculptural, dimensional narratives, activated
by visitors’ gazes – vertically, from the stairs, diagonally, across the gallery, and
horizontally, following the invisible strings that design the exhibition space – as
well as by their random walkabouts around the pieces. Through these crossing paths
and looks, words inscribed in the space, over heterogeneous surfaces and areas,
combine into temporary grids, lines, meanings, and meta/physical poe/try.
Federica Martini