Luiza Margan
Ground work / 2009

13.10. - 01.11.2009 Luiza Margan’s solo exhibition is the first artist within the YVAA (Young Visual Artists Awards) international network, also including the Bulgarian BAZA Award, to have an exhibition in Sofia. In 2007 Luiza Margan was awarded the “OHO” award for best young visual artist, the Slovenian equivalent of the award. With her works Margan builds unusual logical connections between modern life and the life of artworks themselves. They are not mere installations occupying some exhibition space, but rather seem to be “inhabiting” that space. Challenging the belief that a work of art is “nonhuman” or “non-living”, she transforms objects and their surrounding environment into animate entities. Her exhibitions feature plants or living organisms, a house’s breathing roof, a topologicaly disfigured fireplace, which “cannot find its place”. All this is related to the social environment, the places of origin or places to stay, which value or meaning is questioned and repositioned. The Bulgarian-Croatian artist created new works for her exhibition in Sofia. They were inspired by the idea of hereditary land as a symbolic category, namely land as a symbol of social identity, a consumer product, potential capital or something of personal value. The idea was triggered by the relationship between the artist’s art education and her Bulgarian roots. Like many families of ex communist countries, her family too was able to reclaim their land after the fall of the communist block in 1989. By the further transformation of values, namely in rapid consumeristic circumstances, the money earned by the unavoidalbe sale of lands was shared between a large family, helping the artist further finance her studies in the art. The artist, directly influenced by this transformation of economical and simbolical values deals with the possibilities of transformation, acording to the critical social identity situation form one side, and the engaged artistic engagement from the other. Featuring objects, installations, photographs, drawings, videos and stop motion animation, the exhibition comments upon both political and personal history. The artist brings up the issue of the contrast and relationship between material and intellectual values. The former precede the birth of art in a national economy or in the life of almost any artist, yet only their proper management results in a genuine "artistic product".