A cross cultural language of girlishness.

Natalija Ribovic at the H2 in Augsburg

The youngest artist in the ring of Augsburgian art awardians is also the most international, fitting the spring and summer programme of the Augsburgian art collections and museums (we've already reported about Anastasia Khoroshilova and "Czar Silver" at Arts-on.com). Natalija Ribovic, serbian but grown up in Augsburg, art student in Vienna and Italy and living in Tokyo, presents in her exhibition at H2 a cross-cultural and multimedial art. Coloured paper drawings, installations and videos create a kind of pleasureground of girlish experiences and fantasies. As the artist told in the regular artist talk hour, the collection of works tells a story of two fairytale-like human persons, one of them in a way the artist's grandma, another a huge toy, an animal made of polypropylaen and formed like a mixture of a playboy hare and a cuttlefish. It not just jumps around, but succeeds in different roles like the woolfe in Little Red Riding Hood's story, suddenly shifting into a technology, peace and communication manager and staying in this function to be accepted. The curly lines of her drawings, the airy scene of her videos and the lightlyness of her tree and carpet installation narrate this funny text about herself, her family and everyone in a very unencumbered, unstressed way. The drawings change between white and just pencil lined surfaces and compact coloured ones, the tree shows, like graced for eastern, some nicely formed papers with narrative symbols drawn on. Another piece of work consists of oval forms, too, ordered around a picture's picture (of Jakob Fugger, famous Augsburgian) and reminiscent of the tradition of icons in eastern christian art, that has still be profanized in western culture in the tradition of friend's oval portrait pictures in the tradition of roccoco's sensibility and its romantic continuance (as cultural selfreflection for example, in Goethe's "Wahlverwandtschaften"). The symbols on the tree's papers show the figures of Ribovic's narration in different forms and with objects, that are thus presented like objects of a theatrical setting the visitors are allowed to imagine while looking through the tree and its little pics into the room. Some text is given, a poem Natalija Ribovic has written about experiencing a differently culturalized world. Following the promenade of "Octo-Hasi" - that's the toy animal's name - through the appealing and alluding offers of symbols-to-use - in an individualized way of course - the visitors can catch a glance of selfexpression and the approach of contemporality in the strange mixture of japanese, globalized, deeply east-european and western systems of language and scripture.

Although the artist tends to marginalize the influence of her literary and art historical influences - as the curator Thomas Elsen pointed out, the Bauhaus (in the colour striped carpet, the drawning and the idea of everyday art and environment very obvious), or, as the artist emphasized, modern literature like James Joyce, it would even be possible to see her art as especially modern because of its putting on stage a cultural fund to try it out. The artist does, explicitly, identifying herself with octo-hasi, like the poodle of Goethe's famous figure Faust, and thus far easier to accept for everybody as artists like Sophie Calle or Stefanie Trojan (comp. report on Trojan at arts-on.com), who show real and personal interventions in her artwork. Well, innocence, as harmlessness and encumberedness, is perhaps the most fitting predicate for Ribovic's fresh and strange girlishness. When the artist, then, judges her art of being "most completly understood" by children in an event that took place in the exhibition at the H2, she fortunately exaggerates. And with upcoming projects in the international art scene, her concept - with a solide base in conceptual arts - can be assumed to become more conscious and consciously conceptual.

Exhibition until the 11.th of May.

H2 - Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst

Amagasakiallee 1 / Am Glaspalast

AUGSBURG

(see ARTS On events or press releases for details)