AUTOKOMANDA
Show 1
Autokomanda presents Internal Time, a selection of works previously shown at Sculpture Center in New York by the artist Adriana Ramić; and Looping Line, part of the black and white drawing series by Sam Porritt.
Adriana Ramić - Internal Time
Adriana Ramić looks at the connections from both our physical and metaphysical world, selecting them and showing us what is special about them. The pickled vegetable jars host handmade shapes of various creatures. They make us think of preservation and time, home and isolation, personification and identification with symbols, foods, or animals that we might not observe with attention otherwise. In the other room, the three videos on loop tell the story of a chance encounter between two fish in an aquarium, which results with their offspring. Adriana's eye traces their movement and behavior, taking us back and forward between the macro-lens view of the aquatic world and the life-size reality of a living room environment, the latter of which spontaneously, as if unknowingly, facilitates the micro world of the former to emerge.
At Autokomanda, the videos are accompanied by the reading of a text written by Adriana's father, about time travel, quantum physics and its supposed promise to solve the mystery of space, an interest shared by pseudo-scientific and mystical readers on the other side of diagonal thinking.
Sam Porritt - Looping Line (Black and white drawings)
Sam Porritt's works at Autokomanda follow, as he'd once said himself, 'the audacity of the line', an exploration of the medium of drawing. As a practice, drawing surprisingly often has no premeditated subject: one just needs to get on a long phone call while holding a pen to remember how easy it is to make an involuntary scribble. The repetition in Sam's drawings is, in fact, reminiscent of an element from the old telephone, the looping line that connects the receiver to the machine. Simultaneously, these works offer evidence of the mind-hand connection, a depiction of an endless telephone line, and potentially a representation of time, guiding us through the ways and paths that the line travels and, literally, takes our time.
It is worth noticing one odd drawing, in which the line finally deteriorates from the loop, making its future path unpredictable for us. This brings forth the other series included alongside the looping line, in which the artist invites the eye to determine facial familiarity from the vaguely figurative linear expressions. These works become a meditation of the face that 'is as changeable as the surface of water' and, together with the looping line works, play with an urge for existential readings of minimal gestures, as well as seeing meaning in what are possibly non-directed things and unintentional shapes.
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Adriana Ramić (b.1989, Chicago) explores the tenuous pathos and interiorities among earthly and machinic beings. Multidisciplinary and conceptual, her work spans installation, video, text, sculpture, drawing, and software, often drawing upon studies in computation and behavior. Through enigmatic vignettes of perception, she investigates the sensitivities of existence and comprehension in both personal and abstracted forms. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Wschód Gallery, New York (2024); Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2023); inge, New York (2022); Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2019); Stroom den Haag, The Hague (2019); Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2018); Kimberly-Klark, New York (2017); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2016); LUMA/Westbau, Zürich (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015), among others, with forthcoming solo exhibitions at David Peter Francis, New York (2025) and Switchboard, Berlin (2025). She is currently a participant in Berlin Program for Artists.
Sam Porritt (b. 1979, London) works in drawing, sculpture, text and moving image, addressing both individual and shared histories, largely concerned with human agency and its associated ethical implications. Sam studied sculpture at Chelsea School of Art before completing his postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2005, and has been living and working in Zurich since 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include: Saint Martin Bookshop, Brussels, VITRINE, Basel, Indiana, Vevey, Circuit, Lausanne. Recent group exhibitions include: Last Tango, Zurich, Villa Bernasconi, Geneva, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Centre Cultural Suisse, Paris, CAN, Neuchatel, MONA, Tasmania, The South London Gallery, GANA Art Gallery, Seoul. His work has been included in exhibitions in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America and is held in private and public collections worldwide.
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This show was supported by current friends, patrons and members, which so far include Mihailo Mihailović, Milica and Toma Živković, Zoran Dmitrović, Ljubica Arsić, Vlada Tanasković and Natalija Paunić, and in-kind support from Vanja Žunić, Bogdan Brdar, Marko Obradović, Marko Radojković (and Nemanja), Saša Tkačenko, Oliver Schlafrock team (Stanislav, Jura, Žile), Ana Konjović, Umetnički prostor U10, galerija Kolektiv, Elmae Muslija, Vladimir Krstić, Jasmina from Kalenić market.
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APPENDIX:
An excerpt from Tables by NP
A woman on the bus is wearing a T-shirt with words on it: “Take care of yourself”. The letters get lost in between her breasts. This is that moment when I know I’ve arrived. Look at me, I think, if I’ve entered another reality, you will look at me. She does not look at me, which, instead of a discouragement, comes as confirmation.
I tried to explain my obsession with reality-shifting to a collector, one of those who like to be acknowledged as smart. There was an article that helped me with it, written by the father of the artist Adriana Ramić, on which she had based some of her practice I believe. It was called “Space as a multi-dimensional hologram” and told in a language that constantly transforms itself, alternating between poetic and factual. As such, it gave me just what I needed for my own feeling about life – a proof that it is a scientific theory, if not fact, that space and time are not what they seem. “A lot of the eerie, abstract terms introduced by new physics hit the same spot as mystical beliefs. The widespread presumption that it is, in fact, the law of physics that can answer the questions of sense and purpose in our world, suggests an unavoidable mystical epilogue to physics and cosmology”. He saw this as a sign of human hope, but he remains vague as to whether it is his wish that time travel is real, or if he really thinks that it is possible. My own thinking is more about whether it makes any difference. He ends on a perfectly balanced note: yes, predicting the future is real, but it can only be done by those who already see the conception of future events in the present. Perfectly factual, perfectly mystical.
My friends, family, enemies are all tarot cards, as we rub each other a certain way, as our actions affect the most unlikely of others. Some time in my early childhood, I was told that I was not good enough, by someone I trusted with my life, who could never be wrong. My future was predicted right then: at some point, no matter what, I was going to lose. My fortune-teller was brought up in the same way. I see this curse everywhere in this country – at the basketball semi-finals against an objectively better team, our players suddenly play well enough. Just as they think they might win, a doubt is cast, sent from dozens or hundreds of generations ago: they cannot win – so they lose. I carry this sentiment so firmly that I am not even aware of it until it comes, like a reflex; like you just naturally feel that you should move off the road not to get hit by an approaching car. There is another way to look at it all, and it has nothing to do with physics. You could argue that this passive inner knowing, the prediction of one’s own negative future, is simply bad faith. So, in terms of time-travel: you must go back and change that belief. Inform your team of a new game plan, or even, write different rules of the game. Like Trinity said to Neo: you cannot die, because the Oracle told me I’d fall in love with the One, and I love you.
Stars never really align. Space has at least three dimensions, and time is the fourth one. That means that even if three stars appear to 'align' in a straight line, their timing differs. Sorry, he says and he means it, as he pours me another glass.
So what? I say as I taste my wine, if time is a relative thing, does it matter if it’s the star or the memory of the star? Perhaps they, actually, always align, perhaps they’re always everywhere at the same time.
The gibberish of what I say, as well as how I phrase it, reminds him of that Oscar-winning film, Everything Everywhere All At Once. I cried so much when the two rocks spoke to one another, and he remembers it, because I couldn’t stop talking about it. He moves his hand in a soft circular motion on top of our table, giving the wine a swirl, gracing our conversation with extra sophistication, because whatever is told over good wine resonates with a deeper meaning.
Either way, there’s no such thing as the perfect moment, or Mercury in retrograde. It’s all random, and if we should consider ourselves lucky, it’s because we are here at all, and not in pieces of cosmic dust, matter, post-collision with some comet.
Why is it always so gloomy with you? I ask, as I look at the fine lines on his forehead, and the nasolabial folds that only appear as his lips turn into a smile, in response to my quirky personal question, which makes me smile too. Makes me wonder where the pattern of attraction for smart, gloomy men comes from. Why does everything have to be rationalized?
He ignores my rhetoric, for which I love him, because it doesn’t really matter and frankly I only need words as transport, nothing more than a carrier of our voices, what we say does not really matter. I just want to be present.
What is it with you and Asian films? You talked about Oldboy for years after you saw it too, he goes back to the film, but really what he wants is to ask me something personal in return.
I don’t know. I think they speak to my loneliness.
And I’m the gloomy one?
Our eyes meet in a tilted virtual plane in the space above the tabletop that separates my body from his. The table is a placeholder for what would have, between some other me and him, in some other reality, been a kiss.