TU-BITI / BEING THERE razstava / exhibition

Here we are, almost at the end of our EVS experience. We were able during all that time to discover Slovenia as much as possible, enough to be able to 'give it back' a little bit. In that way, we decided to organize our own exhibition and we named it 'Dasein' (Being there), to refers to Heidegger's philosophy. Here is what we wrote about it to explain our approach:

“How much time do we need to get to know a foreign country? How much time a foreigner needs to get over the „touristic perspective“? For how long he or she is determined to experience only shallow exoticism of a visited country?
Actually, what does mean this „get to know“? Fresh foreign eye maybe could be an advantage. A foreigner is not nostalgic. There is not any relationship to visit countries and cities. Maybe that is him who can see clearly the reality.

French Cécile Bondon and Czech Marek Šurkala are spending 10 months in Slovenia. During this period, they have tried to understand their host country. Different mentalities, traditions, habbits, historical and political background, kind of humour, relation with the nature, language, food, … They had to cope with all of these aspects.
Now, they try to articulate gained experience. Their way of artistic expression is totally different. She draws illustrations. Her work is done with traditional skills, such as mechanical pencil or gouache (a specific kind of paint similar to watercolor but modified to make it opaque). She is mostly an illustrator for books. This time, it is more like a soft parody of educational books or user's manuals.
He takes photographs. He tries with his camera to capture the most truthful image of reality as is possible. Simple composition, absence of strong visual style, wide-angle lens, using old analog technology that prevents to do any manipulations.”

To gain the attention of the potential visitors, we tried to do a strong communication (strong of color contrasts actually!). We mixed two of our images to put it on the announcement poster. The result looks silly, on purpose:

We mixed the three flags (Slovenia, Czech, France), and we painted it on the front wall of the gallery K18, where we had the exhibition, in Koroška cesta:

Then we organized our opening and we were very glad to see a lot of people interested by our work ! For me and Marek, it is our first official exhibition. It is pretty hard to show its own work, I still have some problems with that, but as we are two, it is much easier.

 

For my part, I did something different from my usual illustration work. This time, I did a really realistic work to not be too far from the photographic work of Marek, and also because I didn't want to distort anything from what I saw. So, just as it is, without judgement or approval. My work is divided in two parts: a colored part, which is illustrations of objects, one building, or representative element of one event in Slovenia. And another part is in black and white, only graphite on sketching paper, where I am playing with Slovene words. It is actually portmanteau words, several words in one. Funny or poetic details I saw in some words (for example otrok can be otok. Which means child, and island, so totally different with only one letter less). So I was really looking forward to see the reaction of Slovene people. Some of them liked it very much, some other didn't react, some tried to kill me. No, ahah, joking :P but it was interesting to see :) 

I think that I am going to do again this exhibition in France when I will be back, to make french people discover a little part of Slovenia through my own experience. Nothing is planned yet, so we'll see :)

It is still visible till the 23^rd of November, you can check everything here : https://www.facebook.com/events/527924414039409/ 

Thank you for reading!

Cécile