Alla inlägg den 3 maj 2009

Av Lars Vilks - 3 maj 2009 10:53

Tamara Grcic (b. 1964, Germany)

In the last years, the artist has been working predominantly with natural objects. First, she studied and documented during the course of many months the various stages of decomposition of different fruits and vegetables. Arranged and formalised, and thus held at a distance, the still fresh, or already rotting, mouldy, running, or shrivelled objects demonstrated for a short period to the outside viewer as well a very own capacity for transference. Their material presence, the fact that actual changes can be seen and smelled, created an invisible context of emotions and associations, without allowing a reduction to one pattern of interpretation.


In a series of steps, each oriented towards a specific spatial, temporal, or situational context, Tamara Grcic has expanded the thematic space of her works and made their borders increasingly permeable. The hermetic grasp of natural cycles has transformed itself into a more playful dealing with the material which she places in other contexts and combines with formal elements. This leads to a creation of transitions between naturalness and artificiality, real conditions and imaginary possibilities.

 

In the biennial 700 oranges "visit" the art space and are spread across a large part of the room on irregular display-tables. Their actual reality lies in another cycle which here only for a short time intersects with art.
In the central market, these fruits circulate in daily and seasonal cycles in significantly larger quantities. Their organic existence is subject to exact time schedules and transport routes that are run through quickly in order to keep the fruits fresh until they reach their destination. Like an industrial product, they are part of a more or less homogeneously accessible offer of commodities. The short stay in the biennial interrupts this time schedule. What becomes important is how they are individually arranged, the tension they create in another space, their display, their colour, and the smell they emit. The displacement, the freeing from their normalised boxes, leads to an intensive physical charge that would under other circumstances remain concealed.


For Tamara Grcic, this reveals for a moment an imaginary reality existing between two otherwise separated worlds. But in the film three oranges escape for a short time. Its feedback, in the end, leads to an actual detour: it was originally intended to only borrow the oranges and then hand them back over to their usual cycle. As this was not possible for reasons of foodstuffs law, the project was enabled by the donation of a Ladonian wholesaler. I her video work Untitled (Escape of the three oranges) Grcic makes a humoristic comment on her work in Twelve Hour’s Exhibition in Portikus, Frankfurt (2008). Questions concerning the decay of natural objects, the logistics of the fruit market and gender are posed in an amusing way when mirroring Sergei Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges
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