Art Gallery „Nadežda Petrović” in Čačak invites you to the opening of the exhibition

Irene Lagator Pejović

EXPANSES OF LOVE

April 6th, 6pm

with the opening speech by Branislav Dimitrijević & Mirjana Šijačić-Nikolić

Curated by Patrycja Ryłko and Julka Marinković

The exhibition is part of the program Laureates of the Memorial  as part of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nadežda Petrović.

Expanses of Love, Irena Lagator's solo exhibition, features a diverse selection of the artist's recent works, including new artivist commissions. Both thematically and spatially, the research-based works deal with Inflation, Labor and Knowledge. It addresses the complexities and contradictions of today's situation, in which we can no longer deny that a critical economic and environmental breakthrough is now of the utmost urgency.

Irena Lagator Pejović directly addresses each of these issues through relation of history to contemporaneity and the insertion of both her own and other people's very personal experiences while unpacking the storytelling we have grown accustomed to. She gives more voice to the transdisciplinary perspectives, societal transitions, as well as knowledge protective towards the environment. Lagator reveals the growing tension between social responsibility of the community exchange and natural resources versus widely accepted political agencies built on toxic, heteropatriarchal mechanisms that promote inequality in the distribution of information, labor, money, and natural deposit.

In a broader sense, the exhibition has been conceived in relation to the concept and process of the book as the most magnificent human invention, depository and transmitter of knowledge, but also a witness and mediator of its paradoxical instrumentalization. In a more narrow sense, the exhibition sets out from the work “After memory” (2007), which received the award at the 24th Nadežda Petrović Memorial. As this work questions several layers of meaning – aspects of remembrance of the life and work of Nadežda Petrović, contemporary history, art, and economy – the exhibition refers to the specificities and contexts of the Yugoslavian self-governing and post-Yugoslavian transition region. For the exhibition title Expanses of Love, the artist takes as one of the points of reference the literary schoolwork contest book from 1985 on the topic of the National Liberation movement in Yugoslavia, greater equality and solidarity, a bridge of human to human in the name of freedom. One of its texts, for example, was written by a real-life primary schoolgirl. She shares a reflection on what she would do if she were Ronald Reagan. She fearlessly imagines a time without conflicts, wars, boundaries, or struggles. Nevertheless, given our recent history and, more importantly, the reality of today, with the rising cost of living and the constantly present wars, it seems extremely far away and unattainable to achieve her innocent childlike yearning, courage, and light.

Not only does Irena Lagator consider multiple perspectives and voices and make them visible with the artist means, in a conceptually rigorous and contextually expansive ways, but most importantly, she offers actual models of alternative economies for unemployed people or defined solutions for reversing the winding spiral of ecological collapse through grassroots small initiatives, such as possibility of planting specific plantsto extract heavy metals from the soil and polluted areas. In her engaged approach, Lagator presents these materialized stories in a genuine presence of the concerns of our time..

Opening of the exhibition EXPANSES OF LOVE takes place on the day of commemoration of the Nazi bombing of the National Library of Serbia, on April 6, 1941. On that occasion, over 600.000 books, manuscripts, charters, documents, newspapers, periodicals… were destroyed.

Exhibition program / Lectures by

Monika Lajš Kisl  Two Cities – Lady Reason and the Writing of History, April 19th, 6pm

Toni Hildebrandt Dreaming Forward – Categories of Non-linear and Non-circular Time,May 19th, 6pm

Saradnja / zahvalnost:

Nacionalna biblioteka Crne Gore ,,Đurđe Crnojević“, Cetinje

Biblioteke ,,Braća Nastasijević“, Gornji Milanovac

Narodna biblioteka, Kruševac

Gradska biblioteka ,,Vladislav Petković Dis“, Čačak

Međuopštinski istorijski arhiv, Čačak

Centralna banka Crne Gore, Podgorica

VG Group, Podgorica

Narodna Banka Srbije – centar za posetioce, Beograd

Art at Work izložba Muzej Savremene Umetnosti (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana

No Border Craft group, Ljubljana

Prof. dr Mirjana Šijačić-Nikolić, Šumarski fakultet

Univerziteta u Beogradu

Prof. dr Snežana Belanović-Simić, Šumarski fakultet

Univerziteta u Beogradu