Most of you have probably already met with the works of Anna Ehrlemark. Her comics and illustrations have been published in many different publications, she has also produced many posters, and if you haven’t noticed it before, her work Sisters is still holding on quite well, painted on the outside wall of Menza pri koritu in ACC Metelkova mesto. In the past years, Anna has also contributed to Red Dawns Festival with conceptually and formally well-thought-of visual design, as regular festival goers probably know. This year, she was invited to present her work in the Night Window Display Gallery Pešak (Galerija Nočna izložba Pešak).
The exhibition The Ring consists of five graphics. They found their place in the corridor, behind the windows of the Pešaki building, where they are glowing high above the heads of visitors. From the darkness, clear shapes are forming into objects, some more abstract than others, creating an atmosphere, a certain mood.
The strongest of them is most certainly the image of the ring on the graphic we can see on the left (if we read them from left to right). Right after this one, but situated at the end of the row of five graphics, there is an image of a chain resembling a necklace, like a strange echo of the precious ring with a huge stone.
Because of the way she chooses to depict the objects and because of the schematic shapes, we cannot know who is giving the gifts, and the fact is making us feel uneasy. In the graphic entitled The Chain, we do not know who is pushing the ring onto the finger, whose finger it is and whose hands are placing the chain around the neck of an unknown figure. The forces behind the giving and the getting, the reasons, the expectations, as well as the faces are all invisible to us.
In the middle graphic, there is a face, divided into pieces and silently watching. On each side, there is a more abstract work, creating additional atmosphere with opposing but not excluding feelings of freedom and anger. The Birds and The Eight. In The Eight we see a pair of eyes watching from the unknown, as the one we can see in the graphic with the title The Chain and also in The Face.
These images are like words forming a visual poem with a hidden line: The ring is a silent promise, a gift that you can’t return, an offer you can’t refuse. Somebody is going to look after you after all, inshallah (Anna Ehrlemark). Anna Ehrlemark in her exhibition brilliantly sums up the contradictory feelings that stir uneasiness in the viewers. As such they are an interesting allegory of contemporary living, filled with panic, fear of the future and entrapment. The future, however, is not unchangeable and, in that sense, the message of the exhibited works preserves the hope of a better future.
Anabel Karolyn Černohorski
1 The ring is a silent promise, an unreturnable gift, an undeclinable offer. Someone will care for you, inshallah.
Anna Ehrlemark (1981) is a comic artist, illustrator and linguist. Between 2001 and 2009, she lived at the relation Ljubljana – Zagreb, but is now settled by the North Sea in Gothenburg, Sweden. She started drawing with the Croatian comic bandits KOMIKAZE and worked as a designer and organizer for KUD Mreža and Menza pri Koritu in the ACC Metelkova mesto in Ljubljana. Since 2012, she is one of the hands behind the Novo Doba festival in Belgrade and a spiderwoman in the Fijuk network of comic artists around the Adriatic Sea. She also does some other things, such as collective performance art, together with Swedish ÖFA-kollektivet and construction grammar research at the University in Gothenburg.
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The exhibition will be on display every day from 27th February until 25th March from 20.00 to 1:00.
Co-production: Night Window Display Gallery Pešak (Galerija Nočna izložba Pešak)
Free entrance.
Map of ACC Metelkova mesto
