July 13, 2019 to October 12, 2019
Opening on July 13, 2019 at 19:00
Closing event, EE-0 – live performance, October 12, 2019, at 18:00
Acadiana Center for the Arts
Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
An exhibition featuring video and installation work by Lala Raščić and three other kindred female artists (contributions by Cristina Molina, Nina Schwanse, Ryn Wilson) that all share a dream of radically different feminist futures and whose work invokes mythical female figures and engages through transformative readings of mythological formulae.
In turn she gazes at herself in the bronze of night, in the silver of dawn, in the copper of dusk;
Kali Beheaded (M. Yourcenar)
In the gold of midday, she stares at herself.
The Acadiana Center for the Arts opens on July 13, 2019 with GORGO, a solo exhibition by visual and performance artist Lala Raščić, with contributions by Cristina Molina, Nina Schwanse and Ryn Wilson. An accompanying essay by Jasna Jakšić, a Croatia-based curator has been commissioned for the occasion of the show. READ FULL TEXT
GORGO includes new video and installation work and features recent video projects by Lala Raščić in which she invokes 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 includes The Eumenides, EE-0 and Gorgo, in which Rascic embodies the characters of Electra, Arachne and a Medusa, which all seek to engage ancient Greek myth to a duel through feminist and emancipatory rage.
The Eumenides and EE-0 are based the artist’s performance of her meticulously developed scripts for the camera. In Gorgo, 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. Lala Raščić interweaves the works of artists Nina Schwanse, Cristina Molina, and Ryn Wilson into the narrative of the GORGO exhibition. All stemming from New Orleans’s independent art environment, generationally if not geographically close, Rascic, Schwanse, Molina and Wilson share a dream of radically different feminist futures and work with transformative readings of mythological formulae. In their practices, be it photography, drawing, video or textile, the processual, the horizontal and the emancipatory overlap – through conscious and critical use of new media and through traditional crafts re-visited. J.J. & L.R., 2019
Molina, Raščić, Schwanse, and Wilson are artists who have crossed paths on New Orelans’ burgeoning art scene and whose recent practice is based in invocation of folkloric and mythical formulae and feminist, discursive, speculative, and critical treatment of the topic through carefully constructed multi-media concepts.
IMPRESSUM:
invited by: Brian Guidry and Mary Beyt
exhibition coordination: Jaik Faulk
essay by and curatorial advisor: Jasna Jakšić
preparator: Bethany LaJeune
SUPPORTED BY:
AcA, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb – Office for Culture
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Dan Cameron, Ana Janevski, Janka Vukmir, AcA staff
acadianacenterforthearts.org
lalarascic.com
nina-schwanse.com
cristinamolina.com
rynwilson.com
weareconstance.org
Lala Raščić 