GORGO is a one-day exhibition presenting a project in the making and showcases a site of production, but also acts as a “dress rehearsal” for a more ambitious spatial installation. In the space of POGON Jedinstvo, the artist builds a set for filming of her video performance GORGO. The props and set are left behind in the exhibition space as documents of the process, and complement other objects related to the GORGO project and the video installation of the work EE-0 which, also on display.
In GORGO Lala Raščić continues to invoke mythical female figures, whose bodies were transformed or voices silenced by extreme violence, and whose tragic fates were normalized and interlaced within the dominant tropes of European culture. This series of works was statred with the work The Eumenides. After EE-0 the artists focuses on the mythical character of Medusa. A beheaded Medusa returns in the form of the artist’s body, protected by a copper armor. The Medusa, Gorgon:GORGO resurrects by way of ancient crafts and technology. The copper of the armor is the ancient material that has been worked for battle armors and households for centuries and is mired in the past. Rascic’s video brings the Medusa, with all her meta-baggage, into the present and a speculative future by the simple agency of sound amplification generated by the artists’ body and armor in performance. Gorgo exhibited, stands between theater and the museum. Verbalization of text is excluded from the Gorgo video, and the story is based on ancient representations of the Gorgon’s threatening visage that is, amongst others, articulated as a set of glass objects that throw ominous reflections on the gallery walls. Gorgo’ s armor, crafted in collaboration with the only female coppersmith in Bosnia, apart from evoking a “cyborg in becoming” is treated in the space of the exhibition like the remains of an unknown, ancient, heroine in an archeological display. In the video EE-0, the rebellious weaver Arachne not only denounces the violence and abuse of Olympic gods but she, from a position of a spider, advocates new, horizontal and non-hierarchal possibilities for all types of reading, storytelling, and the use of language in general.
Jasna Jakšić
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Exhibition design: Lala Raščić and Jasna Jakšić
Technical execution: Mario Fudurić
Text: Jasna Jakšić
Acknowledgements: Ivan Slipčević, Hrvoje Nikšič, Filip Pacak, Željko Bašković
Project and exhibition supported by: POGON Jedinstvo, City of Zagreb, MSURS
Lala Raščić 