His Excellency Toshio Tsunozaki, Ambassador of Japan in Belgrade, Serbia 2009.
Legends and stories about sailors’ wives, recounted by the rare venerable old men, between the book, covers or as a testimony in the stone of walled-up windows, have always incited exceptional curiosity among people, particularly those from continental areas.
However, there are sailors’ wives all around us, both literally and in a symbolic sense. One of them, from Belgrade, Aleksandra Kostić – Dimitrijević, through her intermedia exhibition, introduces to us her intimate “diary”, a contemporary counterpart of the archetype story about a sailor’s wife, – a sublime and, at the same time, the complex audio-visual concept of broader significance.Regarding its plastic and semantic aspect, the interactive „Diary of a Captain’s Wife” is a fruit of the artistic inclinations and achievements of Aleksandra Kostić – Dimitrijević. The exhibition consists of light installations formed by four clusters of objects (plexiglass cubes with digital photographs and textual material, containing illuminated figures) and two video works that correspond to them thematically. The objects are clustered in a unique trilogy titled „Passion”, „Expecting” and „Happiness”, followed by „Responsibility”. The unavoidable first person singular, when we talk about the autobiographical context, is here masked by the fact that the author neither encroaches upon the auto-portrait-like presentation nor is subject to the narration. On the contrary, not only does she intend to ascribe the appropriate „manifestation” to the prevailing emotions and cause-effect states, but also indicates their elusiveness, by her intention to visualize them per se, without the expectable associations. This is particularly relevant for the „Happiness” segment. For, if lips, that are preceded by the author’s cycle with the same motives made by the media of photography and digital print on paper, clearly embody „Passion”, and if we associate night with „Expecting”, the „Happiness” seems the most personal, presented in form of a female ice dancer, through success and fulfilment that deservedly come as an award for patience and perseverance of hope at the moment of happiness and abandonment that shall emerge sooner or later. The relativity of such states corresponds to the method of additional engagement of the spectator that the author consistently applies by exhibiting appropriate mirrors, in which it is only possible to read the verses by Yesenin, inscribed on the objects, except for the „Responsibility” segment. Regarding the case of the “Responsibility” segment, everything must be more explicit (the term itself implies it), it is symbolized by the image of a ship, the text that can be read directly from the surfaces of the cubes, and the documentary video that shows an incident-causing situation that necessitates the utmost preciseness of a captain of the tanker. The preceding clusters of hexahedrons complement the second video with a different tone that personifies the female sensibility at the time of expecting and during the moments of fulfilment, as well as the wish to make such moments as durable as possible.After the author carried out several research on a rectangular prism in her objects, she chose, among all, the cube form even for such a new working concept. The cube, as a symbol of shape, persistence, work, perfection, wisdom, truth, as well as fate, happiness, risk, and, finally, as a metaphor for the screen and urban unit in general, proves to be, in this case as well, the best possible choice. Based on the work „Harmonices Mundi” by German astronomer Johann Keppler, a cube leaning against its base symbolizes stability; therefore, it is connected with the ground. Since the author wishes to emphasize the instability of emotions and temptations that accompany the responsibility, she makes the cubes lean against their bases; however, the position of several mirrors on the gallery floor may be interpreted in the context of their relation to the ground, that is, the earth, or, to say it more accurately, with the real-life in a figurative sense. We also connect the cube with four elements. Although without premeditation, the four clusters of cubes correspond with them in a certain order: passion – fire, expecting – air, happiness – earth, responsibility – water. The cube as a symbol of the end of cyclic development, since it fixates the space in its three dimensions, is a suitable medium for giving plastic definitions as well as for personifying the emotional states. On the other hand, as a figure that offers several simultaneous screen frameless images, which stimulates the spectator to move, the cube particularly suits the author whose visual expression always seeks freedom for emitting the energy of the visual tissue and emanation of light, and, since recently, sound, that is, ambientalization of work.Easiness with which Aleksandra Kostić – Dimitrijević approaches the media, expanding the borders and producing the intermedia character of the whole, her interest in 3D, mass-media, and advertising means, that is, the interweaving of the forms of public and private discourse, in the real and symbolical space-time continuum, makes her a representative of the generation whose perception was principally influenced by the paradigm of the informatical era and global world. Being a consistent researcher of the intimacy and lyrical moods as opposed to, conditionally speaking, the epic ones, uncompromised curator of individual personal aesthetics who finds both female and male principles, both personal symbols and visual impressiveness – constants, Aleksandra Kostić-Dimitrijević this time drastically transcends her auto-reflexive creative expression towards the ideal of universal. Ljubica Jelisavac, 2009.
2002.
Solo Exhibition
Post-graduated exhibition/drawings and lithography „Passengers through Time” Gallery FLU, Belgrade
1998. Solo Exhibition „Passages” drawings/lithographs/ambience drawings-light installations Gallery of the Kolarac Endowment, Belgrade, Serbia
1998.
After all the media, technical, stylistic, and poetic changes that have characterized the world of fine arts during its tumultuous past in this century, now at the very end of the century, a question imposes itself again, for the numberless time, the question of appearance and meaning of that immanence of an aesthetic phenomenon in the modern creation of the work of art.
Not so long ago within plastic arts, the imperative of the new and original has finally been exploited and replaced by dispensability of the different and quotable, while to the place of the idea of the project came the pluralistic paradigm perfectly harmonized with altered characteristics of the current epoch, which indisputably forms the link between the outgoing century and the century incoming, between the old and the new millennium. Artists who create in such conditions nowadays, and who are intensely interested in participating further with their artwork on the wave of active linguistic innovations in the medium by which they express themselves, display the customary ambivalence, even the ambivalence of nature of their work. Among the authors who cross the threshold of artistic life, this has become a rule, like a generation mark. In the works of Aleksandra Kostić, a graphic artist with formal education, identical creative points in an objectless complex can be instantaneously identified easily. In the essence of her imagery handwriting stands as a recognized gestural working method that forms the customary plastic spectacle of abstract expressionism, i.e. it is the expression of a physical, decisive swing of hand which in work leaves traces by scratching, squeezing out of a tube, or spilling liquids, etc. We should bear in mind that this method is not performed only in the process of drawing on paper or plexiglass but also in lithographs without the change of intensity of visual energies flowing into them. But, that is only one side of the form character in the case of Aleksandra Kostić. The other side can be seen in her explicit need to shift the objective limits of traditional drawing and graphic medium in two basic directions. At first, that is a desire to move beyond the physical boundaries of paper by an extended movement of the swing lines or stretching the coloured stains over the frame of the plate. Next, there is the unbalancing of the optical boundaries of these works of art by the specific set of works by which the perception of the spectator is greatly broadened and more accountable. To be precise, she exhibits her drawings and graphics on the plexiglass plates in specially constructed boxes, and their transparency enables observation in a variable, multilayered configuration of spatial order. Consequently, out of one stationary, the invariable appearance of the work rises a visually active spectacle that changes in the course of the audience moving. By this means the goal was achieved, the goal to spatialize the fecundity of those two-dimensional works by the sense of the third dimension to elevate their entire visual condition to a lot higher level, i.e. to more obligatory involvement of aesthetic apparatus of the spectator. The general direction of visual creativity during the nineties was going in the direction of the transformation and intensification of the appearance of works of art as they gained optical intensity by using the most diverse means, attractiveness, and singularity of plastic contents. New works of art by Aleksandra Kostić are based on that need and are realized as far as one of the most remarkable and convincing examples. Jovan Despotović, 1998.
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1994. Award for the best Nude Drawings
Fond Djurdja Teodorovica Gallery FLU, Belgrade
Photo serial “The Gift” 2005, Photo: Branko Dodig
2002.
