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CIMO - Center for Research of Fashion and Clothing, within the project BOSA - Briefing on Soft Art, collaborated with visual artist Maja Gecić from Belgrade, and this resulted in a solo exhibition Situation of Absence opened at the BLOK Gallery, Božidara Adžije 11, Zagreb, from 05. - 17. 11. 2019.
In her work, visual artist Maja Gecić is close to textiles and clothing, as a soft medium, where she expands the possibilities of visual language, where she seeks and finds strong reasons to remember a time when workers were protagonists and today only authentic witnesses. Putting together garments from the time of socialist industrial production, through additional conversations, documentation and citations, she interrogates and records the tensions and tragedy of the encounter of the present moment and that which has already belonged to history.
Examinations of memory seek to re-examine, balance, and contextualize by which a particular synecdoche appears as pars pro toto, a case study that seeks to capture a multi-layered image of the distant past and its reflections in a new situation. It is the creation of a situation, by which the transfers of memories of absent and missing productions are placed in a new context, that makes it possible to make a new, re-constructed picture visible.
With this exhibition, Maja Gecić also creates a situation where she puts together several mutually related works that she researches and artistically deals with in her work through several case studies. In a similar vein, it questions the traces of relatively recent history marked by the changing social and production model of the former Yugoslavia, continued by transitional processes of change and gradual disappearance, and case studies related to the once strong and now almost non-existent textile industry. As an artist, she developed a specific apparatus for researching and documenting the disappearance of the Belgrade Wool Factory (BVK), a giant of socialist modernist production. Since 2014, it includes its own "forensic" apparatus (photographic documentation, conversations with the protagonists of the former production), to establish and put in one place reflections of a past and finished state and create a kind of amalgam of image and text as cohesive elements and the newly created situation.
About the author:
Maja Gecić (1974, Belgrade) graduated in 1998 from the Department of Textile Design at FPUD, and completed a master's degree at Aalto University in Helsinki, where she worked as a contract lecturer until her return to Serbia in 2009. Since 2012 she has been working as a lecturer at Visoka textile school - DTM in Belgrade, and since 2019 as an assistant professor at FPU, Department of Textile Design. She regularly exhibits in the country and abroad and is the co-author of the international project Moving Borders since 2014. She has won several awards and recognitions.
BoSA project leaders: Tonči Vladislavić, Ivana Čuljak and Lea Vene
Curators: Tonči Vladislavić, Lea Vene, Ivana Čuljak
Design: Ivan Klisurić
Exhibition setup: Maja Gecić, Tonči Vladislavić
Photos: Ive Trojanović and Tonči Vladislavić
Translation: Tihana Bertek
* The exhibition is part of the BoSA project - Briefing on Soft Arts / BoSA - according to the soft arts questioning, which is a permanent project of the CIMO center started in 2019
* Exhibition supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb for 2019, BLOK Gallery
* Copyright © cimo - a center for fashion and clothing research. All rights reserved.
