Oleg Šuran´s exhibition in Virtual Gallery
Oleg Šuran´s exhibition in Virtual Gallery
But this account was
contradictory and full of holes, also because*
On view from early May to the end of June, 2021
Under the aegis of the Virtual Gallery of the Art Pavilion, launched to promote young artists in a different sphere, we present the next exhibition in the cycle A Different Perspective. This is a project of designer and artist from Pula, Oleg Šuran, one of the young authors chosen by the selector of the whole cycle, art historian Dr Ivana Mance.
Oleg Šuran is an independent designer and artist who is employed as instructor at the department of the design of visual communications at the Art Academy in Split. In concert with Oleg Morović and Andi Pekica he also runs the art organisation Fazan and nakonjusmo.net, a Web portal for design, interactions and art, in addition to editing Polet, a poetry magazine. He is one of the frontrunners in research and critical practice in Croatian design, with a special interest on speculative design practice.
In his work, Oleg Šuran presents an exhibition that in fact has not taken place. In the surveillance camera footage, visitors will be able to see packed crates of the kind usually employed for transporting exhibits and keeping them in before they are hung in the venue. The works, then, are in permanent stasis, waiting to be exhibited, prompting the visitors to track them in the visual sphere, in constant expectation of the ultimate unveiling of the pieces.
Like Schrödinger’s cat, the exhibits simultaneously exist and do not exist in their boxes, which have never had the chance to be unpacked.
On the Virtual Gallery platform, visitors will be able to see documentation about the works that are perhaps there in the space of the Art Pavilion. The work focuses on the theme of corporeality and matter. A series of drawings shows uncommon hybrid creatures of fantastic and practically mythological characteristics, the emphatic physicality of which is in sharp contrast with the sublime distance from the observer. A series of smaller enigmatic objects is associated with the drawings in the virtual space, objects that theoretically perhaps share the space of the transport crates located in the building of the Pavilion. These uncommon items look like skin, flesh, some form of life created in the laboratory, nature or in the artist’s studio. And after all, a studio is a kind of laboratory, one in which Oleg Šuran tests out the capacities and limits of the media and techniques in which he works. The artist plays with the question of the originality and uniqueness of exhibits, and so the works exist in three dimensions – the physical in the studio of the artist, the digital in the Virtual Gallery and the potential in the rooms of the Pavilion.
Visitors will be able to take in the exhibition of Oleg Šuran from the beginning of May to the end of June on the Web site of the Virtual Gallery of the Art Pavilion in Zagreb.
*Italo Calvino, Il barone rampante, 1957. (The Baron in the Trees, Translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)
