Installation view of Ana Aleksić: The Third Shore, 2024, U10 Art Space. Courtesy of the artist and U10. Employing various techniques and media, Montenegrin artist Ana Aleksić develops a practice that explores the spaces around us and within us, touching upon subjects such as transformation, ambiguity, liminality, and boundaries. In her latest project, The Third Shore, presented at U10 Art Space, Aleksić turns towards the inner space to delve deeper into the relationship between her and the spaces observed, posing the question, "What is it within me that reacts to that surrounding space?" In essence, the artist's inquiry dissects the notion of home in a multimedia contemplation on how memory and emotions intersect with physical worlds.
The show is anchored in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and the idea of the "intimate house," which suggests that a home is more than a physical structure. Instead, a home is a "primal" and intimate space that grounds a person's sense of self. As Bachelard pointed out, "a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability... the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."
Recognizing a rising elasticity of concepts such as the hometown, the neighborhood, the street, and the home, the artist looks deeper within to find and unravel the delicate fibers of an inner, intimate home. In a reality where natural and urban surroundings transform into dystopian landscapes, Aleksić "constructs" her intimate house within a gallery space as a personal, internal series of reactions and responses to the changes she witnesses around her.
Conceived as a total work of art, Ana Aleksić's The Third Shore functions as an ambient entity, a single work of art composed of several pieces that communicate by blending visually and audibly. Thus, each piece remains unsigned individually, and the exhibition is an amalgam of physical partitions, overlapping sounds, and visuals spilling across surfaces. As the artist highlighted:
It is a quest for that certain balance that ultimately means credibility.
The core of the exhibition is an installation based on the artist's first memory. It is a childhood memory of walking along the promenade in her hometown in the late afternoon and a lingering fascination with the glimmering white sunlight glancing across the water. Aleksić's video recreating the scene is projected through a delicate white curtain, which insinuates entering a dreamlike realm with its slight movement. The video spills across the gallery walls and the ceiling, bouncing off of two mirrors that recreate the impression of the first memory. Simultaneously, they create several viewpoints, implying the multiplicity of inner positions we assume when revisiting a memory.
Upon entering the installation, you are confronted with the blinding light of the projector's light bulb, which echoes the encounter with the magnificent rays dancing across the water's surface. Parts of the outer world subtly enter the installation: a delicate mural echoes an unrecognizable landscape, several paintings of enlarged landscape details, etched portions on found object panels, and, finally, an installation as a partition wall in the gallery space, repeating the jagged motifs. However, these are not perfect renderings of the outer world but of inner impressions, perceptions, and remembrances.
On view at U10 Art Space in Belgrade, Serbia, until November 20th, 2024, the exhibition Ana Aleksić: The Third Shore is truly an intersection. Rather than attempting to divide the physical and the ephemeral, the emotional and the rational, Aleksić almost intuitively merges visuals, sounds, haptics, and textures to break the boundaries between these contrasting worlds. Throughout her show, daydreams, dreams, memories, perceptions, assumptions, reality, and imagination bleed into one another, inviting and welcoming visitors to integrate their own experiences and memories within the exhibition space. Aleksić described the exhibition as "building the intimate house," yet perhaps the exhibition is also a way of externalizing or manifesting the intimate house already built.
