JOSIP ŠURLIN
Entrance, 2018
installation; wood, steel, digital print on canvas, LED lights, aluminum, 1.5 x 6.5 x 1 m
photographs: Darko Škrobonja, Damir Žižić
Entrance is a multipart installation made from: three wooden tables, three digital prints on canvas and six metal sculptures. The canvases show intersections of the human skull over which are placed aluminum rods. Behind the canvases there are LED bulbs that function as an internal light source of the installation. Three wall canvases are followed by wooden tables placed in a straight sequence on top of which stand black steel sculptures similar to table lamps. Images of the skull are drawings taken from an anatomical atlas that are slightly cropped and overlaid with aluminum rods. Here, pages of a medical book are transformed into specific glowing wall pieces. Their character is, in fact, inverted, as to expose the skull from the inside amplifying the bones with warm light. Furthermore, thin aluminum rods are placed in geometric positions and, like straight lines, they pass over different bone structures. This in turn, is a reference to anthropological means of measuring the skull where important points on the bones are meticulously registered and called anthropometric landmarks. Finally, the same inversion happens with black sculptures. Despite being based on table lamps these objects do not glow and their “lampshades” are completely replaced with steel armatures. The composition of the installation Entrance functions as a fictive environment for the viewer. It can resemble a laboratory room or a sterile experimentation facility. This symbolic narrative touches the subjects of human psychology and the relationship between the individual and the state (primarily through policies such as health care). The open skull dominating this space connotes an “entrance” into the psyche while rods and black sculptures stress geometry, stylization, rigid positions and “spatial control”.