CRITICAL REVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE:
Branka Benčić, Mapiranje Grada/Mapping the City. Exhibition catalogue. May 2007
Vanesa Begić, Pretvaranje grada u umjetnost i umjetnosti u grad. Glas Istre, 6.05 2007.
Branka Benčić, Intermedijski Dijalog. Glas Istre. 14.01.2007.
Branka Benčić, Frammenti / Fragmenti – Identità Instabili / Nestabilni Identiteti. Juliet Photo Magazine. Triestefotografia. And Exhibition catalogue. September 2006.
Radmila Iva Janković. "Walking". Exhibition catalogue. August 2006.
Sandra Križić Roban, “Tijelo – hrvatsko, grad- New York”. Vjesnik, 3.5.2006.
Branko Franceschi, “BODY AND THE CITY”. 02.2006.
Mateja Prinčič, “Povečana Mesenost”, Delo. 24.11.2005.
Branka Benčić, “SKIN” Glas Istre. 5.9.2005
Rosana Ratkovčić, “Otisci i čajni pripravci”. Vijenac. # 300, 15. 9. 2005, Matica Hrvatska.
Zrinka Turalija Kurtak, Vijesti iz kulture, Interview. HTV 1, 7.9.2005, termin: 22:40
Branka Benčić, “Šavovi/Stitches”. Exhibition catalogue. 9.2005.
“Ožiljci, Ogrebotine i Modrice”. Glas Istre. 28.8.2005.
Daniella Dorani. Radio Pula. 7.8.2005. Interview.
Silvestar Vrljić, “ Skin Diary”. Gloss. 8-9. 2005.
Branka Benčić, “Ecriture ili Intimističko Tkanje”. Sonda. 05.2005.
Branka Benčić, “ Lost in Translation – Izložba Olje Stipanović: 300 Signs/Translations/Red – Galerija Proširenih Medija Dom HDLU-a ”. Glas Istre. 21.9. 2004.
Daniela Comisso, “Crteži i fotografije Olje Stipanović u Galeriji PM”. Interview and review for Radio 101. 6.9. 2004.
Branka Benčić, “ Lost in Translation”. HDLU Exhibition catalogue. 09. 2004.
Sanja Markušev - Jelačić, “Olja Stipanović - Red | Translations | 300 signs”. Culturnet. 31.8. 2004.
Dan Bischoff, “Connecting art and the everyday”. Star Ledger. 1.8. 2004.
Tatiana Bazzicelli, “[R]-[R]-[F] Festival, un evento nato dall’artworking”, Neural Magazine, Italy. 20.8. 2003.
Tomoko Ashikawa -Mokomoko and Lauren Mackler. “Book Market – Expace Project 002/2003”, Exhibition Catalogue. 06. 2003.
Laura Tutor, “Think Small: Artists of miniatures” - Anniston Star. 26.04. 2003.
Susan Lee, “Queens Artists’ Work on View in Corona” – Queens Tribune. 17-23 2003.
Timothy Cahill, “Diminutive Delights” – Times Union, Albany NY. 6.12. 2002.
Eleni Daniels, “Long Island City Artists Open Studios” – Interview for Cosmos 91.5 FM Public Radio. 12.2002
Exhibition catalogue for: RADOVI / WORKS
Multimedia Center “Luka” - HDLU Istre. August 26 – September 8, 2005. Pula, Croatia.
Branka Benčić
Olja Stipanović's drawings and photographs examine a field of intersection where fragments of the human body, texts, documents, biography, discourse, and language intercept each other. These works examine individual and collective mythologies, methods of communication and signing, memory, history and identity.
The four groups of works in this exhibition are in process since 2002, when the author acquires her favorite medium- Camedia, ready-made digital technology. The works exhibited are a continuation of the works shown last year at the
PM Gallery in Zagreb. [Lost in translation: 300 Signs/Translations/Red - galerija PM, Zagreb].
Although these works can function individually, Olja’ works are sequences. Their narrative mosaic structure and mental montage connections suggest diaristic character and autobiographical chronology.
Together with a sharp personal expressive poetic, Olja’s works posses layers and a characteristic reflectivity, both in her world view and in her contemplation of the fragile position of the subject. Identities are constructed, made, and faked, in constant flux, in a poetical game of history, culture and power. [Marsha Meskimonn: Art of reflection]. The photographic series RED is a sequence showing fragments of the human hand - the fingers and the palm of a hand interwoven with red thread. It depicts the details of skin and red thread lines as crossroads of cultural and psycho-biographical identification. The body becomes a field for permutations of different texts.
The red thread, through its coloristic accent, articulates the body as a sentence or a thought. In the order of interpretation the thread lines represent the Text - in the way the etymology and meaning of the word are rooted in the Latin word textum (weaving). We can also find and read autobiographical references. Ranging from myth to memory and identity; childhood thread games ("kolaricu panicu..."/Cats in the Cradle) are recalled and reconstructed, feminine handwork -knitting, weaving, threading, as well as mythology in the notions of Ariadne or the destiny threading of the three Parcae... the symbolism of the color red, the analogy with the life lines on our palms and palm reading.
Currently in progress and consisting of more than 400 photographs, the new work SKIN DIARY is a digital chronicle, that documents all the scrapes, bruises, accidental injuries and intrusions on Olja’s skin - made over more than 12 months by new shoes, mosquito bites, bumping into furniture at night, working with a glue gun, etc. The marks on the skin are legible, transformed literally into signs and pictograms. The skin is identified as a multifunctional surface that generates and documents experiences, information and events.
In details and fragments, the series develops as a sequential narrative. RED can also be read as a visual diary or a story. Those works can be looked at as self-portraiture/autobiography, where the author positions herself as both the subject and the object. Such positioning allows voyeuristic and fetishist looking emphasized by the digital media and the proximity to skin it allows. The visual appeal and beauty of the image surface do not undermine the legibility of the body.
This intimate ecriture although achieved in the media of digital photography can function as a drawing, pointing out its linearity and fragility. On this intimate level the weaving as storytelling makes the body legible as a range of ideological positions that are constructed, as a temporary meeting of the subject and codes on the intersection of social formations and personal history.
"…Carving a space for oneself is embodying the body, marking its context, its framing, and the medium through which it is represented/transmitted. As a woman, carving a space for yourself means lifting your downcast eyes very slowly, returning the gaze, mirroring the representation, masquerading (Mary Ann Doane) or hysterically mimicking (Luce Irigaray) the phalogocentric discourse. Carving your space means moving very cautiously from total passivity to subversion or resistance, responding to the gaze, to the representation. But to become an agency, to become an active participant and not mere replacement or symbol, the actual body has to be marked. And then again, the body cannot be marked so long as it has no marked space; it has, then, to occupy the space between the frames, the empty space; there to embody the corporeal and not the metaphoric body…"
Exhibition Catalogue for : WALKING.
Galerija Marino Cettina. August 4 - August 25 2006. Umag. Croatia
Radmila Iva Janković
In 2004 Olja Stipanovi? exhibited a body of work - Red /Translations/ 300 Signs at the Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb. It was the first time I came across her work - hundreds of drawings based on the International Sign Language and in the series Red, the photographs of the palm wrapped in red thread. By subtly interweaving the thread over minute depictions of the lines on the palm of a hand she evoked associations of text as weaving, textum. A few years later Olja again used the camera objective to get close to skin by documenting marks, folds, scars and small wounds. In her artistic vocabulary, the body became a place of reference, a constant in communicating autobiographical experiences, impressed memories, emotional diagrams and amplitudes of being.
The photographic series Walking is dedicated to daily routes mapping that strives to be objective, thorough, and precise to the point of almost absurd footstep counting from one location to the other. The photographs placed as a continuous frieze reminiscent of the film negative show several more or less ordinary routes - from her home in Queens to work, going to show openings, some impromptu walks through New York neighborhoods (Soho, West Village…). Other, larger format photographs from the same body of work are random snapshots of footsteps, of walking feet and Olja's shoes on different grounds that do not reveal much.
The connection to earlier work is indirect; we feel the desire to show the invisible with the use of the obvious, to materialize something fleeting as the current of thoughts or the nature of time. The focus on the routine action that vanishes day after day into the anonymous moving masses reminds again of the experience of language, the reversible transcription of the place on the irreversible path of time. The documented evidences of walking emerge as a whole and complement each other by creating an idea, the image of feet in motion that can be understood as an identifying signature. In the photographic process itself, the gaze first travels from the subject to what is in front only to return to the subject whose walking through the labyrinth of the city shapes a personal trajectory.
Exploring the phenomenon of everyday life Michael de Certeau compares the act of walking in urban settings to the act of speaking or narration in language. At work is the process of the walker's assimilation of the topographical system - the spatial realization of a place. In the process of representation however, only the remnants, the traces, or something reminiscent of the breadcrumbs scattered by Hansel and Gretel through the woods are usually visible and transposable with the experience of walking. The representation that uncovers the limitation of view by the frame of the camera is subjective and partial. It creates personal paths through the city grid by documenting the walk through editing cuts at random places, street corners, intersections and curves.
What constitutes the core of continuity in Olja's artistic work is the confidence in the restorative aspect of art, its capability of clearing up emotional traumas and restoring the power over one's own body. In the body of work constituted by Red, Translations and 300 Signs, the way of working out trauma - the interruption of communication, is the gesture. In the later work - Skin Diary, the communication happens through diaristic documentation of intrusions on skin seen as the point of contact between the inner world and the outside. Manifesting her sensitive presence through marks that could be defined as "forms of absence", Olja evocatively speaks of how discovery is always just an elusive process intertwined with the unspeakable and the incomprehensible since neither text nor individuality can be revealed as exact truths.
The documentation of the everyday activity of walking seems now as some sort of struggle for here and now, for the inscription of one's presence in the overwhelming spaces of the city. The disproportion between reality and its digital representation by method of continuity and cut reminds of methods used by the French artist Sophie Calle who follows strangers and documents their movement or through a middle-man engages a private detective to follow herself in order to show the inconsistency between seeing and what we want to see.
In the reading of Olja's Walking series, we return again to the fact that the artist with her camera records not only what she sees during walking, but also her feet in movement - which in the world of symbols, as the grounding for the upright position, represent strength.
History, states De Certeau, always starts at ground level, with footsteps that are the prerequisite to being, understanding and experiencing the world through one's body. While thinking of her new obsession, Olja has in her sketchbook scribbled a note on the privileged position of the walker which enables him/her to be both present and absent at the same time. The person who walks is more than audience but less than a participant, considering that his/hers alienation is justified by walking itself, by moving toward some real or imagined destination.
In the detective act of searching for self-appropriation, the activity of walking does not mean the acceptance of place. It does without a doubt emerge as the announcement or presumption of unrest and positive tension. The struggle for here and now starts with a simple exercise of making conscious an ordinary, everyday body activity: walking.