The river in me; the river around me; Erosion of a Future Memory
Location | Gallery CEKAO; Public Open University/Gallery FELtspace Adelaide
‘Erosion of a Future Memory’ is in response to collaborative research activity between Adelaide based Gail Hocking and international Croatian artist Nikolina Butorac for exhibiting at FELtspace Adelaide December 2021 AND Gallery Cekao – Cultural Centre University of Zagreb, Croatia April 2022
Truth is an emotion, it flows through our body. Veins, chest, heart. And the question is how much do we hear her rustling, her warmth melting our in our chests. We bathe in a storm of warm and cold that murmurs and shakes under the flash of the thunder that revives and changes us. To accept the new means to enter the struggle. n.b.
We want to materialize a sequence of different memories, which form activities that honestly depict the current state of the planet and us, through the gesture of writing, poetry, drawings, ephemeral interventions, performances and sculptural objects that can shape boundaries, indicate trajectory, and enable views.
The accidental audience is the seed of reality that processes the artistic act, thereby growing together with the artist. Art activity can express the elements of truth in the culture, so every time a work of art is created, new meanings are rewriting old ones.
Wanting to learn more about the past of the Sava River, Nikolina Butorac led workshops in two nursing homes in Trešnjevka, asking the protégés to associatively draw a positive memory for her; the smell of the river, the water that called for bathing, the plants that grew near it. She composes the resulting works into new collages, which follow the photographs of Gail Hocking’s artistic interventions in the empty riverbeds of South Australia, reminding us of the great droughts, shortages of drinking water and fires that have become more prevalent in recent years. Part of the work are artifacts, created by a symbiosis of natural and artificial, taken from several different places that the artists addressed important for their research. At the opening, Nikolina Butorac handed out blank papers to the audience, asking them to draw or write a new work that would protect the river and raise awareness of the importance of water, and hung their drawings among other works. Nikolina Butorac was a mentor for a collective performance piece by students of the non-verbal theater- academy for art and culture in Osijek, focusing on the river Drava. They were re-examing their own responsibility towards social and environmental events that surrounded them and conducting research about the possibilities of overlapping individual and collective experiences.
