Ksenija Orelj
Welcome to Balance Exercises!

After First, Comes Second explores how people and art cope with the pressures coming from society, but also from ourselves and our own expectations to be perfect, efficient and always in balance. How do we say, then, without using words, that we have fallen out of balance, yet we keep going? What happens if we point to the inadequacies of the system, that which doesn’t work on a personal and collective level? In which ways institutional spaces become the places of learning about interdependence? Instead of confident poses, this exhibition offers a view from the margins, a view from below. It offers us the chance to slow down, at least a little bit. It presents a non-hierarchical model of creating and getting together, where shortfalls, errors and vulnerability are not weaknesses: they are the pillars of collective resilience.

The exhibition gathers eight invited artists of different generations presenting their work through sculptures, installations and site-specific interventions: Kristian Kožul, Vedran Perkov, Viktor Popović, Gaia Radić, Igor Ruf, Sara Salamon, Tanja Vujasinović and Vlasta Žanić. Their artworks, created from 2018 onwards, engage in light, text, sound, video and readymade. In this exhibition, they navigate the space between the Museum’s interior and its courtyard, which was deliberately chosen as a gathering point for both accidental and intentional passersby.

Unusual red beings emerging from the courtyard stream are the first thing that the visitors will encounter. This sculptural intervention by GAIA RADIĆ connects the stream bed with the exterior. With its spine-like forms, which remind of some creatures from ancient life, it looks like a fragmented memory of lost structures. The shapes are familiar, though not quite close to us; we recognize their language intuitively, but we cannot decipher it completely. The artist says, the elements of the work appear as functional remnants of something that is lost, as fragments of organic or artificial decay. It puts an emphasis on what comes after disintegration: interdependence, not just human acknowledgment and shared resilience.1 The intervention by VEDRAN PERKOV also carries a reference to our shared entanglement in simultaneous crises, and symbolizes a withdrawal from neutral positions and narrow modes of functioning. The dilapidated museum facade, a symptom of economic crisis and the discontinuity of cultural policy, is refreshed with humorous messages. Like collective mantras in times of general exhaustion2, simple, comforting sentences are glowing on the Museum’s façade: Now is a good time, Help is welcome... This textual work raises the question – can institutions foster trust, instead of speaking impersonally and from above? At the same time, it encourages us to enter the museum space, and it also serves as a temporary remedy for social anxiety.

Inside the exhibition space, IGOR RUF explores the balance between the modernist ideals and the modern reality. In his curious installation, he thematizes the contradictions of the consumer culture that promises life of comfort, yet is always late with delivering the promise. In the imbalance between reality and illusion, his work reinterprets the legacy of modernism as a fragile memory of belief in progress and the potential of prosperity. In his other installation, Ruf builds a delicate pyramid. It looks wobbly, as if it would collapse under its own weight. This parodic replica of monumentality and pyramidal social structures is an ironic commentary on the idea of solid foundations and eternal duration. It reminds us that even systems we see as stable are subject to being unstable – especially when viewed from the perspective of those who carry their weight. A similar wobbly relationship between the false and the authentic can be seen in SARA SALAMON’S intervention into the museum’s architecture. By doubling one of the elements of the museum’s space, the artist plays with the boundary between fiction and function, real and fake objects. Through this perceptual trap, she invites the audience to re-examine their own sense of orientation and balance in space, because the first glance is deceiving. This play on perception becomes a way to test the reality, which is getting more and more layers, and is often subject to faking and misinterpretation – both in everyday life and in institutions.

The question of the visibility of artwork within a broader system is also addressed by VIKTOR POPOVIĆ, whose work activates parts of the museum that are usually inaccessible. Through a series of lightbox photographs, suspended at the edge of physical stability, he illuminates what usually remains out of sight – provisional equipment and piles of artifacts stored in the museum’s depot. Popović gives us a glimpse into the hidden regime of spatial control, raising questions about access to artworks and the privilege of decision-making. What remains hidden, and what is pushed into the background? Taking up the role of both curator and artist, TANJA VUJASINOVIĆ brings a forgotten work from the Museum’s collection back to life. She quotes Ivan Kožarić, interpreting his drawing through light and sculptural media, in very small dimensions. She approaches the stored object as a body caught in inertia, giving it a new reason to survive. Her act of mediation draws attention to the cyclical nature of attention and oblivion within institutional structures.

VLASTA ŽANIĆ addresses contradictions in the system, existing on the levels of power distribution, inclusivity and absence, and she does so without fear of exposing the uncertainties that are inherent to the creative process. In this anti-monumental, playful installation, the artist stages her own retrospective, gathering different elements from her everyday life and fragments of her earlier works, arranging them together without resorting to conventional curatorial selection methods and linear logic. In a time of fractured attention and constant urgency, she emphasizes the need to slow down and reflect. The act of sorting through the chaos of life, where the conscious, rational, and intuitive intertwine, emerges as a foundation for achieving inner balance. KRISTIAN KOŽUL examines the fragile architecture of the body, with silence that we sometimes cannot escape from. Instead of grand gestures and narrative clarity, Kožul presents fluid forms in the process of assembling and re-assembling, with visible points of fracture. Evoking the collective trauma, he highlights a vision of the body as a construct of different relations and forces, rather than a fixed identity. Imbalance is no longer a private matter, then, but a shared experience – a symptom we recognize, although we still haven’t named it.

The exhibited works have a thing in common: they all address the issue of the foundations of personal and collective balance, as well as artistic and existential one, in these times of sudden social crises and virtual acceleration. These playful and teetering forms manifest through genres related to sculpture, which is always in a sort of struggle with gravity.3 Instead of relying on classical techniques of sculpting and craftsmanship, these works draw on strategies of appropriating fabricated objects or existing forms, presenting them as creative tactics of sustainability and a means of redistributing what is common. In doing so, they rearrange familiar divisions such as original vs. replica, the sublime vs. the banal. They alter the functions of discarded objects, activate their dormant or forgotten uses, or entirely redefine them. In this way, they test the limits of an object’s lifetime and its potential for renewal, responding to a culture of rapid obsolescence and hyperproduction.

The matter of balance is the primary sculptural task of these works. They experiment with the distribution of elements in space, which they highlight as a collective entity, as a negotiation between various components and their relationship to the environment. In contrast to classical sculpture, which focuses on upright and homogenous objects, they explore methods of decentralization, revealing the limitations of vertical structures and exclusive positions. At the same time, they speak of balance in a metaphorical sense. By rearranging the center and periphery, the act of supporting and being supported, the foreground and background, they remind of everyday moments of feeling displaced, restless and out of control. (Much like me while writing this text and trying to find balance between subjectivity and concrete artworks.)

Balance is presented here as a dynamic model of adaptation and adjustment. It is not committed to a static ideal, but responds to a practice of improvisation, which takes into account affective excesses, discomfort and irritation – states we tend to hide. But disbalance does become visible when we are under physical and mental pressure. Therefore, this exhibition focuses on all those imperfect, incoherent bodies, in spite of the culture that insists on self-sufficiency and individualism. Its title also speaks of this shift: it moves the focus away from the achievements of the ‘first’– of a leader, ruler, master, or even the figure of the artist or curator as a mystical creator ex nihilo – and redirects it toward everyday life, which relies on reciprocity and often invisible support4. The title After First, Comes Second points to this transition: from the myth of ‘the first’ as the exclusive and dominant factor onto the sharing of knowledge, support and imagination. Instead of the chase for some previously unattainable standards, where gratification is often deferred, it is interested in processes of repairing objects and re-tuning subjects. Along with fragile corporeality, the exhibition’s vocabulary includes the search for non-hierarchical models of connection and organization, which releases suppressed energies and angsts through play, experimentation, and humor. When ‘the Second’ finally comes, the defense mechanisms gradually loosen and give way to risk-taking. Adriana Cavarero calls this model of mutual relations ‘a critique of verticality’. Reflecting on the abandoned idea of integrated and cohesive ego, she suggests a relational concept of subjectivity, which transcends seemingly stable identities. In fact, even today, despite the apparent decline of the postmodern, one must resist the temptation to break the subject down into fragments, turning its pretense of unity into a feast of difference. (...) Instead of breaking its vertical axis into multiple pieces, one could try bending it, giving it a different posture. This could perhaps happen by inclining the subject toward the other – as the relational model allows and, from a geometrical perspective, even encourages.5

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The installation is made of five double-sided light boxes with photo prints on canvas. The photos show the interiors of museum storage rooms where artwork collections are kept. They were taken in spaces that are part of institutional framework but remain physically and symbolically outside the public’s reach. In this specific case, the collection is not accessible because there is no permanent exhibition – which indicates some limitations in the museum’s function as a public memory institution.

Each box is created as an object between image and sculpture – with internal lighting that activates the surface of the print and produces a distanced, almost ghostly effect. They are installed vertically along the gallery walls, fastened with tension straps that visually and symbolically evoke conditions of storage, removement, and temporary stability.

The work explores the relationship between institutional preservation and public accessibility, between archiving and oblivion. At the same time, it questions the conditions under which artworks exist within the museum. The lightboxes become visual markers of what is preserved but not shown – traces of presence in a temporary state of invisibility.