On Alen Aligrudics
Paradigm Metamorphoses
A text by Celina Lunsford
Paradigm Metamorphosis is a trilogy of photographs, moving images and written narratives. Black and white portraits stand for individual experiences. Commentary texts reminisce the circumstances. Colour photographs and projected short films provoke the stories. The photographs have no captions but the stories do have images. The exhibition presents the visitors a string of many places, which evoke common associations of displacement, transition, survival and what is home.
Among the colour photographs on view one shadowed self-portrait is not to be missed. >>No questions allowed<< appears as graffiti code, not written and thus becomes an ironic leitmotiv. It actually reminds us to do the opposite, question, as if we need to be reminded. These photographs constantly seem to whisper like a siren, >>Do you know my name?<< Neglected architectural icons of social modernism seem displaced in their original settings; once important thru-ways, roads and paths are still waiting for transition; a broken and scarred, once grand leafy banana plant has survived. Objects and their settings enable us to experience limbo, not knowing where we will go.
In a statement the artist refers to conceptual inspiration of visualizing how >>the familiar<< and >>the alien<< are evermore trading places, as described in Boris Groys essay, >>Europe and Its Others<<. Traditional activities such as the brewing of homemade liquor is photographed and filmed like a theatre stage of tragic comic proportions: a one-man monologue, while brewing the potions, which help to forget the troubles and survive the day to day. This entrepreneur from the factory of magic firewater is exotic and local simultaneously.
A more idyllic place with no name is perceived as two adjoined trees on a hill. If this were in Iceland, the locals would say this is where the trolls live. In the Balkans it is a spiritual retreat, a place of refuge, which has now accumulated crosses.
In Balkan Banana and other Stories Aligrudic incorporates the theme of the familiar and the alien in a semi – documentary format. The people in the portraits have no names but they have memories that are spliced into the stories. The words float above the faces on a transparent surface only to reinforce the ambiguity of whom the stories truly belong to. As harmless as the homely atmosphere at first seem in these small Polaroids, the composition of the background evokes the division of place. In all the portraits an >>open<< boarder of space runs linearly between the edges of the curtain and the top line of the sitting couch. The portraits are unpretentious but capture a genuine communicative moment between the portrayed and the photographer. The people become the objects, which hold the outside world of the window to the inside of the home together.
Imagine the visit to a friends for breakfast. The table is filled with the basic necessities: coffee, tea or jam bread with a bit of cheese. I want to take your picture, here, in front of the window. Alen Aligrudic instigates his viewers, to be part of >>living history<<. The acquaintances become more than the picture, as they now are our channel to associations of a place and its purpose as they knew it.
Alen Aligrudics images may have become more subliminal than in his earlier photographic and film works, but they are by no means more romantic. With Paradigm Metamorphosis he provides more accessibility to choose between viewing and spying, between reflecting and wanting to forget, between fearing and embracing, between dreaming and documenting.
c. Celina Lunsford, Frankfurt am Main, 2013
