Zora Stančič’s work is full of life. Deeply committed to graphics as its basic horizon, it often acts as a very direct reflection of life in its limitations, its fragility, its flaws, its interior and its exterior. Graphics lend themselves directly to these preoccupations, as their process is often similar to the work of a surgeon who cuts into the membrane that separates below and above, that divides the “interior” of life from its “exterior”, making an incision into the thin membrane that guarantees our integrity, our wholeness, in contrast to the uncontrollable exterior to which we are necessarily oriented. It is similar in the case of art, which is always torn between enthusiasm for life and the need to formally condense life into a particular transcendent experience that will articulate its meaning that much more clearly and decisively. Art is torn between its devotion to a multitude of stimuli, of social and cultural experiences, and the need to secure a certain space of freedom from these stimuli while at the same time maintaining a relation to them, the need to establish a certain distance, which is essential for the formation of a perspective.

A certain tower. It is no coincidence that the tower is a popular metaphor used in the parlance of contemporary art to proscribe contemplative detachment from the world and operation beyond its preoccupations. At the same time, this tower is, in a way, the fate of art, insofar as art wants its idea to cut into the surface of the everyday with emphatic sharpness, like a knife cutting into a fresh piece of linoleum. It is in these coordinates that Zora Stančič’s thinking congeals in the exhibition Life in a Tower. The space of the Pentagonal Tower at the Ljubljana Castle, with its visible scars of the centuries, the most foreign architecture to an exhibition of contemporary art, becomes a direct incentive for reflecting on the frameworks of the operation and practice of contemporary art. In the exhibition Life in a Tower, this reflection on frameworks unfolds on three levels: the first addresses the medium of graphics directly, in the materiality of its technical basis; the second engages with art and its (symbolic) coordinates; and the third is concerned with the position of a woman in art, that is, the female artist. These three moments are inextricably linked both in Zora’s work and in the present exhibition.

The exhibition has been prepared in cooperation with the Ljubljana Fine Artists Society.

Text and photos from www.ljubljanskigrad.si