VESNA POKAS An exhibition without a title
The material elements that Vesna Pokas puts into a gallery interior or the exterior of a city, a garden setting, are not art objects rather instruments that catalyse the experience of a given space. The artist first of all explains the space to herself, confirming its characteristics and transforming it, in order to be able to draw attention to the fullness of its potentials. She often contests the everyday use of the space by installing barriers that require it to be used alternatively. For example, in Poreč, at the end of the nineties, taking part in the Poreč Annale, she put in a narrow city street some metal rods that stopped the usual pedestrian flows, the passers-by being forced to change their route to the destination they had in mind. The daily routine was thus broken up, and the character of the space emphasised. She had applied a very different but equally mind-opening approach a little earlier on Lokrum Island, on the staircase of the Maximilian Gardens, where she put in glass plates, achieving more of a psychological than a physical obstacle, enabling the visitor in return to have a concentrated view of the lovely scene and a reflection of the cultivated landscape from the point at which movement is frustrated.
The artist created the most drastic, a practically menacing, type of obstacle in 2005 in the Gallery of Extended Media in Zagreb. She set up a sturdy, pointed metal lever, which like some kind of airborne mowing machine, evenly driven by a noisy electrical motor, circulated around the space, practically touching the walls of the Meštrović rotunda. In their endeavours to avoid any onslaught from 'the radius' of the iron bar, the visitors were forced to retreat before it, or else to follow it very carefully, so that their movements were determined in a most particular manner, and their perception of the space took on a distinctive and unexpected angle.
Treating space as a place of contemplation, the artist, heeding the suggestions of its distinctive features, in every single case thinks up a different approach, making use of different materials that in a temporary transformation bring out its specialness.
So she acts this time too, in the Forum Gallery. Undertaking the bold gesture of blocking up the major part of the storefront window onto the street, she has then done a transparent geometrical drawing with the exact line of the uncovered part of the glass. She carries on the interventions into the interior with glass. In detail, she puts in a series of slender glass tubes that link the floor with the ceiling beam, creating a loose wall and forming a narrow illuminated corridor that changes the usual direction of circulation through the Gallery.
As well as pointing it up in the title, the artist in various parts of the space implements the absolute geometry of the figure of the square. But not in a literal depiction, rather fragmentarily, in hopeful indications, in both two- and three-dimensional interventions. She counts on the potential of the perspective visual experience, that is, on the possibility of the virtual completion of the figure. Thus diagonal lines that are formed by the white sand captured in glass tubes to precisely determined heights indicate a spatial figure that corresponds to that on the floor, and carries on from that formed in the gallery’s window display. With its material and formal interpretation the idea of geometry that the artist runs through the whole of the spatial installation at once disputes and confirms the setting as found. In the final result, the space is precisely, with its dignified transformation, fully called to itself, its being and spirit are animated, each part of it becomes legitimate. Not only does the procedure address and confirm the global architectural concept, with all its elements, like he pillars, steps, rails their component parts, the materials and colours, but even those infrastructural interlopers like wall sockets, air conditioning units, radiators, become a non-conflicting part of the overall established harmony.
Vesna Pokas has replaced the surety of the finished artefact and the relatively easy use of the gallery nook by an uncertain adventure in which one has to face up to the environment, testing out its import and its aura. She approaches it with both amicable understanding and resistance to its conventional use. Hence her art is vibrant and living, alternately graspable and yet evasive, and a stay in the 'corrected' space and its new or reinforced experience is equivalent to an encounter with our own spiritual being, above and beyond the material premises that frame it.
Antun Maračić
* text from catalogue " In a square ", Galerija Forum, Zagreb,2017.
