Sara Salamon
site-specific installations,
2026
collaborators: Hrvoje Spudić, Jakov Habjan
curators: Morana Matković, Ana Škegro
photography: Hrvoje Franjić
Text by Morana Matković and Ana Škegro:
“The title of the exhibition Mise en abyme by artist Sara Salamon is borrowed from a term that refers to the structure of an image embedded within an image, a scene within a scene, suggesting a space that perpetually reflects itself, yet always through displacement, deviation and fracture. Departing from the notion of space as a system that “performs itself”, Salamon, in collaboration with the artist Hrvoje Spudić, develops in the Richter Collection a series of spatial interventions that destabilise the possibility of orientation and the perception of space. Rather than introducing elements that would make the space obviously different, the artist intervenes in its most ordinary and seemingly most stable components. The ceiling, the column, the switch, the light, the incline, and the sound remain recognisable, yet their relationship to function, to the body, and to what is expected is altered. The space thus becomes a kind of experiment in perception: familiar enough to be recognised, yet altered enough that we can no longer act within it with complete certainty. Realised within the framework of the SintArt cycle, the exhibition enters into dialogue with the theoretical and artistic legacy of Vjenceslav Richter, in particular his reflections on space, the straight line, ‘synthurbanism’, and ‘heliopolis’, transposing these into a contemporary context marked by a crisis of trust in images, information, and the sense of reality. In doing so, Salamon does not reconstruct Richter’s ideas but uses them as material that can be reactivated from a different historical and perceptual position.
(...)
It is worth noting that Salamon does not deploy technology to produce an illusion of spectacle. On the contrary, she works with ‘materials from architecture’ like plasterboard, timber, lighting, columns, light switches, ‘found’ within the (exhibition) space. Everything remains close to the familiar, even the banal, and it is precisely for this reason that the deviation feels more powerful. The space does not become unreal; it is not a space of illusion. It remains almost the same, yet it is no longer reliable or safe. In this sense, the title Mise en abyme can also be read as a description of the very process of looking. The visitor observes the space, but the space simultaneously begins to ‘observe’ the visitor through their reactions. They try to understand what is happening, return to the same object, test their own perception, and seek confirmation in a second glance or in another person’s reaction.
(...)
Her exhibition takes shape at a moment when systems have been destabilised, when the ground beneath our feet is once again shifting, or indeed giving way, both politically and perceptually. Instead of designing a new system, she examines how far the existing one is still able to sustain, to hold up, our trust. If Richter’s starting point is the question of how to organise space so as to open up the possibility of a different life, Salamon’s starting point is the question of what happens when we no longer know whether we can trust the existing organisation of the space that surrounds us.(..)”
Exhibitions:
- 23/05/2026 — 19/12/2026 — Mise en abyme, The collection of Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb