
Scent is our most primal sense. It is processed deep within the brain where it connects directly with the regions that control emotion and memory. Therefore, it is easy to understand how a scent can transport us to a different place and time in a mere instant.  
The interdisciplinary collective, I:BICA, proposes to create a project that explores this topic by integrating personal experience and scientific expertise through the mediums of immersive/interactive video installation and public discussions with expert speakers on the subject. The resulting project will be both an art exhibition and an educational showcase; where the lines between the two disciplines will be blurred. 
This work is yet to be produced. The main element of Sense Memory is a video work. Footage for this video is being shot from 24.09-01.10 on the island of Cyprus by artist Lidija Ristić. The artist is returning to the island for the first time with her mother since they fled there in 1991 at the outbreak of the Yugoslav civil war. They will be leaving the island on the same date that they first arrived there, 31 years ago- thus symbolically closing a cycle. Cyprus was their first stop as refugees. It marked the beginning of many decades long life as diasporic peoples. 
 
Before they return to the island on the 24th of September of this year, they will visit the oldest perfumer's shop in Belgrade: Sava. There they will have custom scents made with elements that remind them of the time they spent in Cyprus- like pre-bottled memories. They will bring the perfumes with them on the trip. During their time on the island, they will retrace their steps from years ago. They will see people they knew then and who helped them transition into that new way of life. However, the footage Ristić shoots will not be “recreations”. Instead she will focus her camera on shots of water lapping, mandarin oranges swaying in the sun or maybe a woman stroking her arm absent-mindedly as she is deep in conversation over a cup of coffee. There will be an emphasis on allowing imagery to flow and “speak for itself”- so as to evoke what it is like when one is recalling a memory. As they travel around the island, they will periodically spray themselves with the perfumes from Sava. This ritual will be a way of symbolically carrying Belgrade with them onto Cyprus and will form a physical, yet ephemeral, bond between the two locations. 
 
After the footage is collected it will be edited together so it can be used to produce an immersive installation. The same perfumes the women carry with them on the trip will become part of this installation. The installation will then become the site for a panel discussion on memory, scent and the connections formed between mind/ body and past/present. The discussion will be lead by I:BICA members, art historians Milica Grujić and Brajan Vojinović. The experts will be the master perfumer from the shop Sava, an otolaryngologists and a clinical psychologist. 
 
During this time of spiraling conflicts around the world, Sense Memory is an attempt to cast an incantation to close cycles of violence. With this project we ask can healing on a personal scale reverberate to positively affect the world around us? 


Sense Memory 

The dawn of the World Wide Web promised us utopian open societies. Smart phones and virtual meeting platforms have given us unprecedented levels of “unlimited” communication. Yet we have been unable to escape societal and institutional problems simply by moving into a virtual realm. Mediated, explores the limitations of lives lived online and attempts to posit new possibilities for open exchange in light of what we have learned after almost 30 years of internet culture.

Video artist, Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdótti, and performance artist Jannis Weu, will produce a video work examing the narrowly defined conditions of heavily restricted interpersonal, sexual, public/private norms emposed on us by current political and societal structures.

The subject of the piece, Weu, will enact a series of actions based on a strict set of predetermined rules. This will be performed within the confines of the video and at times will break the “4th wall” in an attempt to engage with the viewer. Ríkharðsdótti will utilize post-internet /social-media visual language as a means of engaging with topics like: the Turing test, advancements in AI, proliferation of multiplayer video games, Metahumans/verses and the “uncanny valley”. Mediated will ask, what does true harmony between us and our technologies look like? 


Mediated 

This project is a site-specific, institutional intervention by Brajan Vojinović and Lidija Ristić. As an art historian, and interdisciplinary artist respectively, museums have always held a special significance for us. We hope that by sharing our reverence for Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernandez Blanco, we will be inspiring others to feel a similar tenderness towards the institution. 

Visitors will be greeted by a poetic text inviting them to reconsider their relationship to the space and how their many senses intertwine with the environment they are entering. Drawing on Eastern traditions of mindfulness within the context of Catholic Mission architecture, we hope to foster new perspectives on spiritual traditions within a contemporary framework. 

An audio track composed of multilingual words, calmly stimulating visitors to engage deeply with the spaces they pass through, will play on speakers throughout the museum. At the exit, a tablet will offer them the opportunity to add a word of their own to the composition. Thus the public will be able to integrate even further into the experience by leaving something of themselves behind. Discrete installations (sheer curtains with phrases articulating details found within the galleries, diffusers spreading scents derived from various cultures, video made from images of objects in the collections to be projected on the decorative walls and ceilings) will transform the institution into a temple of multicultural synthesis.  

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This project is site-specific. Therefore in order for the work to be developed further one of two options are necessary. Option a) the Museo Fernandez Blanco hosts the artist group once the proposal is approved so that in depth research into the institution can be done and footage for the videos can be shot. Option b) the museum sends the group detailed information about the institution and staff organizes a videographer to shoot items from the collection (through consultation/direction from the artist group) to be used in the production of video installation. 

The research collected will be used to develop the following: 
-Abstract videos to be projected on the museum’s ceilings 
-The flow of the installation: what rooms will be activated by what elements. The goal of the project is to make discrete interventions in the museum. Therefore not every space will have all the potential elements added to it. Some will simply have a scent, some just a curtain. Regardless, the artists will aim to design the progression of intervention in a way that builds visitors' curiosity and engagement exponentially as they move through the galleries.
-What scent combinations will be used.
-What words will be printed on the curtains: to accentuate details they are surrounded by. 
-What words get recorded as part of the initial audio recording. Similarly to the words used on the curtains, these will be deliberately chosen to draw attention to details of the museum’s architecture and collection.  


MEDITARI

OLTAR is a site-specific exhibition made for The SoutHeritage Foundation for Contemporary Art, featuring two performances. While treating a niche within the Foundation as a sacred space, we will provide a unique experience both for visitors and ourselves. 

During the opening performance we will create an “altar” of plants. Visitors will then be invited to care for them with water from a fountain placed at the center of the exhibition. As part of the closing event, visitors will have the opportunity to adopt plants that were made “sacred” through this process. This exchange between the visitors, ourselves and the space, will question whether the line between sacred and secular still exists. 

Our goal is to raise awareness of difficulties facing our environment. We want to (re)establish people’s relationship with nature. By presenting individual plants as sacred objects, we hope to propose possible ways we can treat plants outside of the context of the exhibition. We further hope this will be extended to the way we treat fellow humans, other living beings, and even ourselves. 

Science is a good tool to shape our understanding of reality. Religions, at their best, try to bring humanity together. However, science can often disparage the power of intuition/our inner knowing. Many institutional religions impose heavy limitations upon us and reject progress and innovation. We wish to bridge this divide and show that we are creators of our own reality.


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Opening: 
2 rows of 9 plants stand with their roots wrapped in burp outside the entrance to the exhibition. The artists approach dressed in costumes designed using research of attire used in international religious/spiritual rituals. Around each of their necks are large necklaces in the style of rosaries/prayer beads. One by one they pick up a plant resting on the ground and carry it inside to pre-arranged pots, sitting on “altars” (peditals covered in graphics of endangered local botanicals). These pots are designed to emulate religious vessels from various cultures. As the artists place the plant into the pot, they will detach a strand from their necklace and tenderly place it around the plant’s trunk. These strands are medal-like tags with an inscription commemorating the event/ritual. This process repeats until all the plants are placed in pots. 

During the exhibition: 
Documentation of the performance & a plaque explaining the project is displayed at the entrance. Visitors are invited to participate in two ways: 1) they can take one of the 9 vessels beside the fountain (designed and produced in the same way as the pots) and water the plants. 2) they can sign-up (via tablet) to “adopt” one of the plants at the end of the exhibition. 

Closing: 
The “adoption” form will ask visitors to participate in the closing performance. That performance will be founded on the reverent transfer plants from their places on the “altars” into the hands of those volunteer adopters. 


OLTAR

This multimedia installation will position a live performance by Jannis Weu in an environment made of LED screens playing video work by Kristín Ríkharðsdóttir. Taking inspiration from the classic game, chess, Touch Move, will explore constraints inherent in the human experience that have been with us since time immemorial and explore how they are playing out in a contemporary context. 

A dialog will be established between the realm of the screen and the tactile, “realness” of the performer’s presence. Moments of synchronicity will occur and be broken between the two realities. The grid framework present in both the matrix of pixels and in the traditional game board, will underscore the seen and unseen rules that affect our relationships with others and with ourselves. 

Chess’s long history and enduring popularity, starting in Asia and being brought to feudal Europe, serve as powerful symbols. The structures of those “long-gone” hierarchical systems still have enduring effects on our modern existence. Its black and white substrate can be seen as a metaphor for the stifling binary mentalities that still dominate the thinking in many of our cultures. 

Life imitates game. Game imitates authoritative structures. But can we shatter that cycle? Can we forge new realities for truly liberated futures? Can we break free of the structures that constrain our humanity? Can we establish intimate connection and compassion as the supreme rules of our world? Now is the time to make our move. 

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The abstract video by Ríkharðsdóttir will feature inanimate objects as "characters" that will be loosely based on chessmen and will inhabit two distinct binary worlds that will periodically crash into each other. Weu will develop a “color-coded” choreography in which black will prompt structured/militaristic/traditional ballet style movement and white will prompt fluid/wild/sensual/spontaneous movement. As the performance develops the distinction between the two styles will begin to blur. 

A floor decal/rug printed with a still from Ríkharðsdóttir’s video will be Weu’s “stage”. He will scuff the printed surface during his performance. These traces will serve as evidence of his movements and presence in the space for the remainder of the exhibition when he is no longer physically present. 

Three live performances will take place on the day of the opening, the first of which will be documented. After that first performance concludes, Kristin and the curators (who will work together to direct a videographer) will edit the footage collected. The edited footage will then be spliced with her original video work so that when played on loop the two videos appear one after the other. The footage will be set up so that when one monitor is playing  Ríkharðsdóttir’s original video, the other is playing the edited footage of Weu’s performance and vice versa. The monitors will continue to alternate playing the two video works for the duration of the exhibition. 


Touch Move

EMBEDDING EXCHANGE will bring together a Nigerian and Serbian-American artist along with two very specific, rich spiritual traditions into a cross-cultural relationship. By promoting a message of social and cultural exchange, we aim to provide new perspectives on transnational collaboration. With spirituality as our focus we will promote earnest and heartfelt intentions. The resulting artworks will be a form of healing rather than a dividing platform that insists on differences.

Lidija Ristić will take Inspiration from the abundance of rituals and dynamic forms of expression in West African culture. Using contemporary technology she will combine these influences with her own perspective and produce video works made specifically for the project.

At the same time, Daniel Pengrapher will make a series of oil on wood paintings based on his vision of European Renaissance, Neoclassical and Postmodernist movements. His paintings will form a hollow structure into which a screen playing Lidija’s video works will be housed. And within the exhibition space, Daniel will play an audio installation composed by mixing African beats and Serbian traditional tunes. 

The fusion of distinct artistic approaches and these very diverse ethnic traditions will present an opportunity to witness the coherence between two (multi)cultures.  

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The central focus of this project will be a two-side “monolith” that unifies the work of Lidija Ristic and Daniel Pengrapher into one cohesive piece. 
Ristic’s abstract, color-blocked video works, that feature cloud-like forms, will act as the background to Pengrapher’s surreal, renaissance-inspired, figures. A discrete amature will support two LED screens, upright and lengthwise, which will play Ristic’s videos on loop. Pengrapher’s painted figures, will be printed onto either self-adhesive vinyl paper, or stiff thin plastic board, and will be secured to the surface of the LED screens. The resulting effect will be that the figures will appear to be static inhabitants of the moving 4d world behind them. 

Three paintings by Pengrapher and three video works by Ristic will hang on the walls surrounding this central muliti-media object. Speakers in the space will play an audio track mixed by Pengrapher to bathe the entire exhibition space with a multicultural atmosphere. 


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