15 Oct 2013

Ivan Šuletić at EMPTY CUBE project

In this edition of EMPTY CUBE, held at the Appleton Square gallery in Lisbon, Portugal, on October 17 2013, artist Ivan Šuletić (Belgrade, 1982) presents his work 'Triumphal Arch'. This project, whose Portuguese premiere will be attended by the artist, was especially conceived for this event, which consists of a single, unrepeatable presentation.

The title of this ephemeral work consists essentially of an ironic play on the historic references contained in the triumphal arch, both as a political symbol and as an architectural structure. This reference to a specific monumental typology evokes a celebration of war, a victory that will be forever recorded as the memory of a battle, displaying its heroes at the centre of an urban landscape. Even since the times of classical antiquity, the triumphal arch has been a structure that imposes itself as a built memorial that contains the representation of assertive power, reifying it for it future generations.

Within the context of EMPTY CUBE, this triumphal arch created by Ivan Šuletić undermines the notion of perenniality that underlies the very nature of such monuments, by reducing their permanence to the duration of an ephemeral event, as if a cinematic moment had appropriated the structure of the temporary exhibition space to install in it a meta-representation of that symbolic figure that, via the drawing incorporated in the work, became a unique possibility to reconsider what is currently left of the meaning of architecture's representational value as the appanage of autocracy over the transformation and transitoriness of memory and the constructs that indicate it.

This work will be photographically documented, and some of the photos will be displayed on the project's site – www.emptycube.org