Exhibition of Marijan Pende. A matter of time?

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria hosted the exhibition of Marijan Pende entitled “Objekti, Instalacije, Ambijent ... "

The exhibition was planned in two separated spaces of the museum's first floor. In the first part of the exhibition, the viewer could find several objects which were disposed in a room, following the order that could be adopted in any private living space. These objects however (such as chairs, a table, a bike leaned to the wall, a fan,... provoked dislocation and misunderstanding, firstly because of the unusual context in which they were inserted, second because of their inaccessibility and therefor lack of meaning. The artist let the viewer think about the relationship we build with objects and the influences they have on our lives: which value does an object have, if not the one given by humans? Who decides the function of an object? What makes an object more or less useful? By deconstructing the private space and transporting it into the museological one, the artist questions the beholder and invites him to re-elaborate his experience of reality.

photo credit: Boris Cvjetanović. Courtesy of MSUI

In the next room, the spectator was confronted with a similar experience, this time slightly different. The second room was in fact an empty one, far more aseptic and anonymous than the first one, where the viewer could only see a confessional. Again, the object had been subtracted from its usual context and inserted in an inappropriate one, where it lost all its possible meanings and implications to which it could eventually be associated, be it religion, authority, spiritualism, divine, and so on. Also here, the artist turns our paradigms upside-down and reduces the objects to pure matter, depriving them of those meanings we give them. After these two first rooms, the viewer entered the second part of the exhibition, which was also sub-divided in two rooms. In the first room, we could see a video that films the processing of graphite; it was not easy to tell what was that processed this material, because the camera was held really near to the matter, but probably it was a machine. The energetic, monotone, repetitive motion of this processed graphite caught the eye of the beholder in a sort of enhancement and gave him the possibility to reflect upon the raw matter. If in the previous part, attention was focused on the finite objects, in the second one the artist pushed us to look at the “object- making”, which is nothing but creation, namely the pure essence of art. In the last big room, the viewer could find other objects, but this time randomly collocated in the exhibition space and simply numerated in a crescent order. These objects, which looked like minimalist sculptures, seemed having no meaning at first sight, but the materials they were made of are endearing and invited to have a closer look. And one more time, Marijan's objects showed us that they can tell us many, different things, using many different languages and forms: the difference between the first and the last room is not big, since in both rooms, the objects are presented to the viewer in an atmosphere, where it seems that the time stopped and therefor makes the object seem unreal. This conceptualization of the object and the matter was the fil rouge of the exhibition, which invited the viewer to enter the matter and go beyond it.