Comet falling apart (Behing every man now alive stand 30 ghosts) Drawing

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.” 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke Thirty charcoal drawings represent fragmentation of a comet, a symbolic image that presents a today's struggle of the individual to resist the pressures of different social circumstances in the effort to remain true to oneself. The following sound work in the exhibition, is a recording of text taken from the book "On the Nature of Things" ("De Rerum Natura") by the Roman poet Lucretius. Written in the first century BC, the book explores the Epicurean physics using poetic language and metaphors - it talks about the principles of atomism, nature of the soul and mind; it speaks about the development of the world and the diversity of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The part of the book that is presented at the exhibition explains the mechanisms of pressure and gravity and, together with the drawings of the comet, it raises questions about the ambiguities and contradictions of our time. My fascination with natural philosophy came from an attempt to connect two seemingly unrelated stories - one is of the contemporary world and it refers to the lack of interest on the global level for solving the pressing questions, as well as neglect towards the individual; the other is from the ancient world and it describes the true and now known to be incorrect theories about the universe as a whole. In ancient times, the link between the functioning of society and the flawless design of the universe was important - people found their instructions for life by looking at the sky. The contemporary world, on the other hand, tends to gravitate towards disorder - liminality, entropy and uncertainty have become the norm. The importance of the position of the individual is therefore lost and today we are floating in between the layers of reality. Nataša Kokić (…) The contemporary anthropocentric view bases its discovery techniques on the practice of translating of nature into culture by using the means of rational scientific knowledge. The logic of our anthropocentric culture is narrative and its form is representational. On the symbolic level, this resounds in the selection of the name for the aforementioned robotic space probe of the European Space Agency, which refers to the stone from Rosetta—the basalt panel with the inscription written in three languages, including Old Egyptian and Ancient Greek, which made deciphering of the hieroglyphs possible in the 19th century. In situations when translation is impossible, space for imagination opens up as well as the possibility for the suspension of the narrative-representational code. In these transitional, liminal experiences of waiting for an intelligible translation, expectations accumulate. (…) The fragment of the text “Narrative for the comet” by Ana Bogdanovic (the text was written regarding a solo exhibition of the artist Natasa Kokic and it will be published in its full form in last year’s catalogue of the Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award)

Drawing:Charcoal on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:30 W x 22 H x 0.1 D in

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