Artist

Saša Pančić (1965)

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Interview with Sasa Pancic

When Zamyatin says that getting rid of freedom is a precondition for happiness, he is actually mocking the system that seeks to achieve just that. Today, we are indeed like characters in this novel – not within the ideological framework, but within the framework of high productivity and mass media stardom. We have been imprisoned in the architecture of human frailty. Perhaps the only way out Zamyatin’s last resort....humour!

The latest exhibition of Sasa Pancic, President of the Management Board of ULUS, a member of the European Academy of Art (Academie Europeenne des ARTS), a painter with an M.A. degree from the Belgrade Academy of Art under professor Dragan Lubarda, demonstrates that rows of letters on white paper creating forms, shadows or outlines are there for a reason... He is capable of taking the essence from everyday rhythm and placing it inside a picture frame.

* At the end of October, Ozone Gallery mounted your exhibition A Moment of Asymmetrical Silence. How did the ideas from Zamyatin’s 1920 novel We influence the exhibition?

It seems that silence is not at stake, but an interesting dialogue at the margins of time…This is how the exhibition came to life. What kind of a meeting was it?
A huge, universal theme of non-freedom, the system opposed to any individual creativity was brilliantly depicted in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We.
I was attracted by this text, or to be more precise, I took it as a kind of a message and I felt an urge to respond to it. I named a series of abstract drawings A Letter, and dynamically supported them by video presentation, thus using painters’ tools to respond to the message I received. By opening up a dialogue in this manner between different cultural frames, historical circumstances, the past and present, I wanted to embrace Zamyatin through my paintings, with my emotions and ideas, far away...., somewhere in Siberia in 1920.
This exhibition is an attempt to root for all those courageous individuals whose thoughts, works and lives were built in something that today we call Freedom.

* In depicting the world of the future, in which we unfortunately increasingly recognise ourselves, Zamyatin speaks of a time when getting rid of freedom becomes a precondition for happiness, of a time when dreams are seen as a serious psychological disease, as are emotions…of a time when art is made. How close are we to becoming true characters from Zamyatin’s distopia?

- An important part of the exhibition are three video presentations. They appear simple at first glance, with constant dynamic changes underlying the nature of creative thinking. When Zamyatin says that getting rid of freedom is a precondition for happiness, he is mocking the system that is really trying to do exactly that. Today, we really are characters from this novel, not within the ideological framework, but within the framework of high productivity and mass media stardom. We are imprisoned in the architecture of human frailty. Maybe the only way out is Zamyatin last resort....humor!

People say there are flowers that blossom once in a hundred years. Why can’t you have flowers that blossom once in a thousand or ten thousand years? Maybe we’ll just find out about it today, because it is only now that 1000 years have passed.

And now, dazed and drunk, I come down the stairs, towards the on-duty girl, and all around me one thousand-year old buds silently begin to bloom, armchairs, shoes, golden tiles, bulbs, someone’s dark hairy eyes are blossoming as well as engraved fence columns, a handkerchief dropped on a stair, the table of the on-duty girl, above the table – the soft, dark and freckled cheeks of Ju. Everything is unusual, new, soft, pink, and humid.

* This is strange: can anyone find a cure to this dreaming disease or make sense of it – perhaps even put it to use? Can it be that the incurable dreaming disease is actually essential for our survival?

- I could not live without dreaming. This incredible state where you are flying instead of walking is a virtual fountain of ideas. I have always felt that dreaming is a homeland of good people, those courageous spirits able to face themselves. Dreaming is not a refuge from the outside world, it is a part of our reality, even more so.

* Each exhibition is a document, a map of road traveled – that is what you said. It appears that the road leading to this exhibition started way back when, by putting together all the turbulent experiences from the 20th century, the first steps to art, getting to know internal and external worlds. Probably in choices as well...

- In order to explain my attitude and feelings to life’s traveling, since it is mostly creative, I shall use something that I wrote last year in the street:
On a public bus, all the passengers are sitting…there is no crowd. The free seats are always those facing backwards. Space, time and events exist in a moving rhythm (the face is a symbol for forward, the back is a symbol for backward). And all of the sudden, these backward-facing seats give away an uneasy feeling of going backwards – there is a tension in the “backward” seat that greets an arriving passenger. First, looks for a "normal" unoccupied forward-facing seat .... Having seen there aren’t any, he unwillingly and courageously takes the “backward” seat. The feeling is that the bus is taking him back instead of taking him forward, but the feeling is lost with the arrival of new passengers.
As penguins, peaceful and facing the Sun, passengers facing the unknown time-space, peacefully join the general movement.
We are all riding on that bus, unable to influence its direction, some know it and some don’t. My exhibitions are bus stops, I throw myself at them with the passion and expectation that they will make me a better man.
The question of choice is an age-old chicken and egg dilemma. Did we chose something or something chose us? So, Professor Dragan Lubarda says that the Line met him! In my case, it appears that I was struck by a surface with a hidden volume.

* We mentioned that Zamyatin is only the birthplace of an idea. However, your final signature is something for which you are recognized: the play of light and darkness create the surfaces of your new reality. This is a multi-media exhibition allowing for various interpretations. What interpretation do you offer as an author?

- I have remained faithful to black & white artistic expression to clearly express what I want. It was interesting for me to see how typography meets surface and moving shadows. The exhibition demonstrated how close they were. A multimedia approach is always exciting, albeit risky. It all depends on what you want to demonstrate. If you have a clear idea, various media fully contribute to that.

I would like to point out again – the essence of the exhibition is in a dialogue, not only between me and Zamyatin’s text, but among various media.

Guided by this approach, I used the main pillar in the gallery to post quotations and thus accord them a central place. Other exhibits were posted in a dramaturgy that span around the main idea. A viewer coming to the gallery starts reading the text posted on the pillar and inevitably goes around it and sees various positions of the text and the surrounding artistic material.

Thus everything acquires a deeper artistic connotation in addition to the content offered by words.

The opinion of the creator of discontinuity, mathematician Dodekind was of assistance. He said: “If space has a real existence it is not necessary for it to be continuous; many of its properties would remain the same even if it were discontinuous. And if we knew for certain that space was discontinuous, there would be nothing to prevent us, in case we so desired, from filling its gaps in thought, and thus making it continuous.”
This quotation fully reveals the true structure of the exhibition.

* Is tomorrow possible?- Zamyatin asks himself. You “corresponded” with him. What is the answer?

- By this exhibition, I underlined my wish to understand what had been written. That rows of letters in a space of white paper have not remained locked in the time of their creation. I was laughing out loud at all grotesque situations depicted by his mind and eyes. Many visible similarities of distant social models clearly indicate Zamyatin’s ingeniousness. The answer might be found in established dialogue, in the importance of even the smallest contribution to the universal culture of Freedom.


Dragana MARKOVIĆ
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