Transplanted Identities
By Antonio Pasolini
Serbian-born, London-based Predrag Padjic’s earlier, two-dimensional work examined the internal workings of the human body, depicted as a type of Renaissance machine. Redolent of anatomist drawings and car design, the images revealed the artist’s quest to transcend conforming ideas of beauty, genre and gender.
Having recently taken the leap to the media of video — perhaps not so radical a departure for the artist whose earlier pictures conveyed a realism not far removed from the one enabled by the digital template — his new video works, Garden and Sky, set out to explore the relationship between the interior reality of our minds and that of exterior spaces. He’s replaced the motif of the human body with that of metaphysics.
Set up in the Castle Medieval Vault in Southampton, England, the only remaining open space in the castle that once dominated the old town, the site-specific installation is created in collaboration with Rachel Wilberforce, and includes photographs and real plants. Of course, more than mere images projected on the walls, what we have here is a complex externalisation of the artist’s own state of mind as symbolised by the vegetation and the grand skies he found in New Mexico, USA.
One of Predrag’s latest videos titled Why I Left documents a string of people from different countries talking about the reasons that they left their motherland. The feeling of exile is a concern that seems to be growing in Predrag’s oeuvre as his work shifts towards the moving image and multimedia. Garden and Sky seem to operate as metaphors for this new phase in his career.
Shot over the course of a year in a single spot in the garden of his London home, Garden captures the gradual change of seasons and the artist’s own assiduous dedication to his private Eden. The very idea of a garden encapsulates the show’s concern with the discrepancies between external realities and the interior workings of the mind A garden is an ‘open’ space that is also enclosed. It looks like a forest, but it is only simulacra. A garden will always be an assertion of the human control over nature, a collection of signs of our own desires and instincts.
Of course, gardens are also a feature of British life, a signifier of British-ness. England is probably the only country in the world where gardening is a ‘national sport’. By keeping a garden we may conclude that Predrag is also attempting to incorporate a pivotal trait of his chosen host country. Gardens also serve as transplanted spaces that enable a reading of dislocation, transposed identities and migration, analogies to the very condition of exile. Garden plants, like expatriates, adapt to a new condition by retaining certain characteristics of their original ‘loco’. The attraction of a garden is that it provides a temporary refuge to another place, a gateway to another dimension of surreal escapism and fairy tale imaginings.
The video Sky, shot in Santa Fe, USA, blends Wagnerian skies with rainforest sounds to create a projection of the artist’s imagined idyllic place. Again we have an idealisation of a state of mind via an image of nature. Unlike a garden, though, a panorama of the sky is about freedom, abstraction, the lack of boundaries between countries and timelessness. While the garden is a manifestation of a wish to root, the sky bespeaks of a craving for the infinite.
Pedrag also fills the exhibition space with actual plants in an attempt to create a secret garden. The ‘real’ plants work as a nice counterpoint to the ‘videoed’ plants not simply because they help create an atmosphere but because they actually make the recorded image seem more real than their counterparts in the actual physical world.
Dueting with Predrag’s videos are Wilberforce’s light boxes containing imagery of diaphanous beauty, signified by water and light, representing the artist’s attempt to escape into a timeless zone away from what she calls ‘everyday normalcy’. It’s also very feminine in terms of symbolism. In Two Lies we see two half-naked girls lying on the ground amid a landscape manipulated to look somewhat otherworldly. The image throws up questions more than answers them: are the two girls lovers? Are they sleeping? What are they thinking about? Are they lying, as the title suggests? It doesn’t matter. The imagery is the result of this gap between what we think/dream of/aspire to and the actual physical reality that triggers off those feelings. There are no clear answers to any of those questions.
Swimmers deploys an image of water infused with dreaminess, light and symbolism, a return to the womb. We see two female figures underwater, two sub-aquatic fairies submerged in a matrix of light. The surface of the water resembles a thunder box and the impression is that they are entranced by light. Wilberforce’s manages to create images that are steeped in reality but contextualised and manipulated to bring out an eerie dreaminess. She thus manages to present recognisable images while also revealing their abstract qualities.
