Exhibition: Katja Smerdu, Marjeta Medved, Nataša Špiranec – Žarka in dobrote sveta
Location: Gallery ART ODEON
Organizer: ART KUHA and KVART
Time: 7.00 pm
Free entry
Žarka and the Goodness of the World is a performative, multilayered, symbolically rich and sensorially expansive spatial installation that, in its own exploratory way, enters the realm of sensuality and the aesthetics of invisible life forces. In its corners, one can almost sense the scent of spirituality and esotericism, yet in the very next moment it grounds itself on the threshold of contemplation of the organic nature of life and the possibilities of transforming and reviving its manifested forms.
Marked by femininity, emotionality and sensuality, symbolic connotations and the embrace of dichotomy, the spatial arrangement is fascinated by what lies in the background and remains unseen, yet is profoundly active and decisive. The artists emphasise that their collective work stages the world’s oppositions, the tense transformations that ignite and whirl the processes of life on this planet: “The transformations of opposites unfold constantly, like a play of Earth, Water, Fire, Air and the mysterious quintessence of every being, and each time we perceive them in our own unique way. They raise questions, sometimes offer answers in themselves, but above all, they are the driving force of life.”
The shared motivation of the exhibition project is Žarka, an emerging charismatic mythological presence that embodies light and goodness. The artists recognise her in a randomly found trunk of a felled yew tree, discarded and abandoned by the roadside, which academic sculptors Katja Smerdu and Marjeta Medved breathe back into life. Once-living matter, degraded by harsh and unfeeling human hands and deprived of life, is transformed into a totem of museum or gallery value, one that expresses the light of the world and the goodness of life by reactivating the bond between materiality and vitality.
A deeper opposition the artists address is the rebellious stance against a world that, without a trace of empathy or gratitude, cuts down the shoots of pure metaphysical goodness – the possibility of life existing for its own sake. Their feminist composition unites in a display of sensitivity, empathy and emotional positioning towards the margins of the world, towards those whose rights are trampled and whose roots are severed. Ultimately, their bodies are neither honoured nor commemorated, but merely discarded and forgotten. The world remains cloaked in patriarchy, whose hand is unfeeling, whose posture is manipulatively rational, and whose victims are countless.
The installation is a precious tribute to sensuality and life, to gentle, benevolent creative energy that inspires life and turns towards it with gratitude. The sculpture of Žarka, carved from wood by Marjetka Medved and dressed in metal garments by Katja Smerdu, functions as an altar to goodness – that metaphysical presence we so often fail to perceive because it is not ostentatious or dazzling, concealed beneath layers of empty kindness and counterfeit benevolence, poor imitations of what true goodness is. Goodness is the energy that arises from itself, incorruptible and non-perishable, unlike the phenomena of the consumer world, where everything comes with an expiration date and instructions.
Before us, Žarka comes alive within the world of the artists’ handcrafted creations, textiles and watercolours, and also through fragrances composed by botanist Nataša Špiranec. Each exhibited artefact is an expression of one element of life. The visuality of creative manuality is only one layer of its presence; there is much more beneath it. We access this through symbolism—both familiar and newly emerging—forming and binding new semiotic languages, new poetics of space, creation and compassion. In material lying by the roadside, one can find the vitality and goodness that once shaped it, that gave birth to it.
Žarka and the Goodness of the World weaves together the opposing dimensions of reality, visibility and matter with an invisible atmosphere co-created by scents and energies. These expand the space, fracture the illusion of existing materiality, and draw us into a realm of environmental, emotional and energetic installation, through which the artists, with gentle and subtle activism, communicate the kind of world they wish to co-create.
