Sara Salamon
installation, slow mobile ambient
concrete, plaster, silicone, geosmin smell, speakers, motors, styrofoam, wall paint, electrical outlets and cabel
2023
collaborators: Darko Vušak (chemistry) Hrvoje Spudić (programming & production of objects) and Marko-Luka Zubčić (text), Sanja Bistričić (photo documentation in public space)
Exhibition of geosmin scented concrete and plaster sculptures, one moving column and piano that plays guitar.
Text by Marko-Luka Zubčić:
There is one thing horror and comedy have in common - the discovery that some everyday occurrence, some background ordinariness, is actually profoundly different than we have always thought, profoundly foreign to our understanding of the world in which we participate. Our bodies process this sudden realization of the unknown nature of something we took for granted, with horror or hilarity. In a cartoon, for example, the smoke momentarily takes the form of a fence that the main character leans against, and remains leaning until he realizes that his support is dissolving into a mist. The audience laughs, but the character in the cartoon turns pale with chills, aware that they will fall into the abyss because they believed in something obvious. This ridiculous chill of our main character does not arise, we might speculate, only from the fear of falling, but also from the question that emerges when we are betrayed by everyday certainties - what else is also not what it always seemed to be? The audience laughs, but for the character in the cartoon, with the detail that betrays, all reality is revealed as something unstable, impenetrable, or even fraudulent. The detail that betrays reveals that beneath our tentative names and perceptual categorizations hides a terrible abundance, an incomprehensible burgeoning of the renegade lives of matter, media, and social phenomena. Sara Salamon's work surrounds us with "details" that betray - apparently familiar media, objects and processes that smuggle fleeting insights into the depth of their strangeness, unfamiliarity, unpredictability. The archaeological dig pushed us. The pillar we leaned on is moving. A giant piece of chewing gum is taped to the wall of a half-demolished house. The video we watched is blowing up. Concrete smells like earth after rain. The flashes fire, but we can't find who is taking our photos. Through transmedia installations dedicated to researching the betrayals of different media through their unique properties as well as through their capacities for the translation of affective and semiotic contents, Sara Salamon's work awakens us from being tucked away in the orderly obviousnesses of our everyday lives, letting us follow the traces of the terrible abundance of the world hiding at the edge of our domesticated attention. In the presence of that undeniability of everything we failed to notice - all the futures whose beginnings we were late for, all the movements of something ineffable in the shadows of things that our "common sense" interpretations hid from us - all of us who thought we were the audience, on the safe ground of a well-named world, realize that we have always been cartoon characters, staring into an abyss that reveals itself through the evaporation of the obvious support we counted on to save us from falling into the deep unknown of our world.
Supported by: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Rijeka, City of Zagreb
Exhibitions:
- 09/12/2023 — 05/01/2024 — Gallery Laurus, Lovran, Croatia