JOSIP ŠURLIN
The following texts are essays or their excerpts written by four different curators (Jasminka Babić, Ana Bratić, Božo Kesić and Jernej Kožar). These texts provide an in-depth guide to various works by Josip Šurlin featured on five different exhibitions.
Post Residuum, exhibition essay
This essay was written for the exhibition called Post Residuum held in the Gallery VN and the Gallery Knifer in Zagreb and Osijek (2022).
The problem of the world and man’s relationship to it in the frames of Eugene Fink’s phenomenological anthropology is defined as recursive, as man’s ecstasy (exit) toward the world and a reflection of the world into the being that is open to it. “Man as a man is according to his existence a relationship. He does not look like a thing that is primally in and by itself and then in its relations. He is as a relation, a relation to self and other things and the world – he is in space and relates to his homeland and abroad, he is in time and relates to his own history.”
Defining human existence as a correlation in space and time, the exhibition Post Residuum by Josip Šurlin directs itself to a single piece of the cited equation that includes the function of contemporary understanding of space and its connection with society’s collective intelligence, as well as a relationship between the individual and the space that is recently in the focus of the author’s thinking. Works showcased in this exhibition were created in the period from 2018 to 2022 and are made in mediums of installation and conceptual sculpture. The exhibited works also contain ready-made objects, light, smell, and sound. Using a greatly multimedial working manner, Šurlin reconsiders the processes by which a certain location attains culturally significant features inside human language and life thereat emphasizing the influence of such changes on the individual. The mentioned subject is thoroughly processed in different contexts and in many ways. Thus works Avernus 055, Procession, Mastermind, and Recounting End Times, through sound and text, compare real and mythical transit spaces or represent allegoric depictions of constructions for isolation filled with restriction signs and sounds of speeches about upcoming world crises. Ambiental installation Universal Health Care refers to the problems of social care thereby commenting on the treatment facilities, their sustainability, organization, and importance for social communities. Finally, the works Rat’s Manifesto I and II, refer to housing places; in the former, the author starts with a fictive person, that is, an upset individual inhabiting urban environments and seeking his spot for life, while, in the latter, he erects “monuments/tombs” dedicated to living spaces.
In the works Procession and Avernus 055, Šurlin juxtaposes Egyptian and ancient Greek mythological interpretations of the underworld with newly formed highway and garage complexes close to large city suburbs. Two wooden panels with reflective aluminum forms comprise the diptych Procession, more precisely, silhouettes of an Egyptian hieroglyph Amenta that represents the west bank of the Nile River, or a place associated with the underworld; whilst the title of the artist’s book Avernus 055 stems from an old Roman signifier for a volcanic crater, today a volcanic lake close to Cuma in the Italian Campania (better known as Flegerian fields that are mentioned in the Greek myth of Hercules and his fight with the gigantes). Romans believed that the lake Avernus is an entrance into the underworld or Hades. In ancient Greek, literally translated, it signifies a place above which birds do not fly, due to sulfur evaporations that in the metaphoric language indeed resemble hell. Both works problematize the notion of transit spaces and their functions. Language marks derived from the sign system of underground parking garages are associative notions that connect mythological places of underworlds and today’s transit spaces. Their similarity is noticeable in their functioning mechanism. More precisely, underworlds represent selective places of waiting and transition – similarly to their real-life counterparts (highways or underground garages). Unlike Procession, Avernus 055 is an interactive work in the form of an artist’s book with pages made from technical rubber and attached with steel slabs. Each page contains a sequence of words printed on rubber using polishing paste whose prints are, depending on the illumination angle, more or less, visible. By deciding on a book form, Šurlin unites the game of language associations creating a fictive manual of these two worlds.
The spatial installation Mastermind is made from several compositional elements in which dominate two tin barrels filled with water on the construction’s front side. The barrels are interconnected with rubber pipes through which lamps linked with an electric transformer are pulled. The danger of the situation, implied beforehand with water close to electricity, is further emphasized by “Beware of Guard Dog” warnings hung on a wall. This installation is an allegory for privatized, illegally built, and, to casual visitors, forbidden objects located on city edges. We can read a reference to urban-architectural elements of “wild construction” in a precise way. The barrels, restriction signs, and lamps above water are objects that subtly imply the individuum’s enclosing into personal suburban worlds in which life is intentionally cut off from catastrophes, epidemics, and financial crises.
Continuing the context of isolation, the ambiental installation Recounting End Times is conceived on a starting construction of several wooden objects overlayed with aluminum tin in which the author uses sound as the main conceptual element. The form of the installation resembles that of a tunnel from which a hidden sound source recites excerpts of various “scientific” articles that predict catastrophic outcomes of today’s world. Themes, statistical data, and mathematical calculations are extracted from numerous theories ranging from biology and astrophysics to economy and sociology. The data is read by a computer program and transformed into audio recordings, and they refer to speculations about possible ends of the world. The monotone robotic voice does not follow interpunction and gets stuck on particular words thus we become unsure at which point it navigates to the next narrative. The minimalistic structure of the tunnel and the sound element of reading, in this case enumerating, underlines the existentialist allegory of an insecure everyday life produced by collective traumatic experiences. The author’s goal is not to criticize the listed theories; with their help, he alludes to society’s need to face traumas and fears.
The multi-part installation Universal Health Care is comprised of several ready-made objects of a medical character. As the work’s main motive, variously arranged laboratory glass filled with chloride stands out around which are hung white mantles and a rectangular form resembling a flag with steel rods that are fixed on its white fabric. The whole ambient illuminated using UV reflectors intensifies the glow of white fabrics and chloride creating a uniform, sterile character of an ideally clean hospital room. Like Šurlin’s “white ordinations”, notions of the “universal” and “available to all” health care are unreal and distant fantasies, and, with that, a hollow reflection of society and state. The unpleasant desolate ambient of a dysfunctional system is a traumatic experience loaded on to a, by itself, vulnerable health condition of the individual who waits for awareness of government bodies and the renovation of public health.
In the last year, in works Rat’s Manifesto I and II, Šurlin’s reflections from the collective trauma are directed towards personal experiences of a marginalized individual that, inside an expansion of transit spaces and systematic carelessness of political and social apparatuses, tries to function normally.
A poetic attempt under the name Rat’s Manifesto I a large part of its meaning carries in its title. The word manifesto, as the work’s starting point, denotes a solemn proclamation or act of a certain literary, artistic, or political movement, namely, a clear statement of an idea about some social change. Two strings of displays formed from ten pieces of steel slabs of different dimensions refer to different language systems – morphemes, numbers, symbols – through whose narratives a problem of today’s living spaces, from the position of the individual inhabiting them, is observed. The form of discourse is intentionally caricatured using black and red variations of words, motives, and symbols. This revolt statement opposes the ever-growing disappearance of a personal living place and its transformation into utilitaristic spaces of general survival brought by the time of prominent capitalistic trends.
The sequence of wooden objects resembling stylized mouse heads filled with rubber granulate of an intense smell under the name Rat’s Manifesto II continues the problematic connected to the loss of personal space. At the same time, objects allude to tectonic structures or sepulchral monuments. Unlike Rat’s Manifesto I, in this case, the author does not start from a fictive revolutionary and his statement, but rather from finalized paradigms about the dying understanding of space and its inhabitants. In the end, with the respective work, thinking about the phenomena of a place and the traumatology of the collective is ultimately encouraged. Rat as a symbol of hiding and escape warns of the whole infrastructure in cities that, due to the expansions of transit spaces, do not leave positions for places worth living in.
Important elements of living with space, architecture and urbanism, integrate society into a specific “bloodstream” of some location transforming and shaping it according to the model of man. The logic of a healthy relationship with oneself and one’s own living space is lost inside a stream of contemporary existence thus, today, we witness the growing lack of the mentioned consciousness about the cultural importance of places that leads to a situation in which socio-political ideologies are increasingly reconfiguring specific local units into transit surfaces and profitable objects. In the wider sense, it is a general problem of government decisions that manifests itself through collective trauma inside a society in which the notion of living is no longer self-evident. The indifferent relationship between the individual and a place brings us to a process of reducing the cultivation of a place to the remnants of consumeristic spatial adaptations. The exploitative nature of such spaces negatively impacts the psychological states of social communities and opens the question What comes after the residue? Šurlin adduces a direct social comment on the lability of today’s life and the existence after the remnants of spaces and places. The exhibition Post Residuum is therefore a precise study of escapism phenomena that arose as a response to materialistic paradigms with their bases being mostly present in today’s forms of urbanization.
Ana Bratić
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Personal Anarchy, exhibition essay excerpt
This is an excerpt from an essay written for the exhibition called Personal Anarchy held in the Salon Galić Gallery, Split (2020).
From the beginning of his solo artistic career, Josip Šurlin has been preoccupied with the dialectic between the individual and society. The works presented at this exhibition mainly symbolize the experiences of a socially-marginalized subject and the ways in which they confront their own existential traumas. The arena of these events are artificial and surreal living spaces just barely marked by traces of their anonymous occupants. They are simplified depictions of real “cells” within contemporary urban beehives and embody uncomfortable spaces which have been severely affected by social and economic inequality. Šurlin predominantly finds the inspiration for shaping the majority of his art installations in squalid areas on the periphery of Split, that is its haphazard construction or abandoned private properties. In the context of the exhibited works, Šurlin interprets these places as ones in which people live either forcedly or voluntarily. The first observation is related to the limited economic opportunities of the individual, and the second refers to a kind of voluntary exile in relation to the customary living habitus in urban environments. Šurlin notices that both scenarios produce a sort of traumatic experience. In the first case, the individual is constantly and repeatedly exposed to traumas because of their own economic paralysis. In the second, they consciously opt for “self-isolation” attempting to avoid encountering an already-experienced trauma. Despite this, however, the trauma does not bypass them. It catches up with them and becomes an integral part of their lifestyle precisely because the individual’s exile is based on a compulsive need to protect themselves from the trauma, rarely losing sight of it in the process.
All of Šurlin’s solo exhibitions from 2017 to the present, including the current one held at Salon Galić entitled Personal Anarchy, serve to confirm the consistency of his artistic oeuvre. The contents of the exhibition presents five recent art installations, the simplicity of which, as well as their striking artistry, implies a hermeneutic approach to the exhibition.
The works at this exhibition symbolize specific situations which are born out of a kind of social dictatorship or injustice and affect the unnamed individual (be it one or several of them). Not a single one of the installations shows or explicitly states the individual in question. Instead, the exhibition stresses constructed spaces which take on the shape of the “extended” characteristics of the person who inhabits them. Precisely in creating such ambients (marked by a person’s presence only in traces), Šurlin sees an opportunity to demonstrate that the utmost inability of the traumatized individual, in relation to the social paradigm, is most clearly visible in concrete, physical objects, and not in the subjects themselves. These are spaces of the perpetuation of behaviors which aim to avoid a breach of trauma. However, it is clear that they do so without avail and that they, alongside those that produce them, constitute open “wounds” (traumatic units) in the fabric of society.
At the end of the nineteenth century, speaking of man’s ability to better his own life, Oscar Wilde established that it is necessary to free oneself of the dependency on the state, money, and private property, and devote oneself to that which one loves (“To live is the rarest thing in the world.”). However, in today’s circumstances, this is a long-hypertrophied utopism and a failed narrative which has been trampled over by the feet of commodity consumption and contemporary fetishes. Whereas human creativity (which, according to Wilde, does not have to be purposeful) itself becomes a commodity exchanged for material welfare. He who attempts to live this way most often separates himself from society willfully, or is ostracized from it like some kind of local “lunatic”, a homo sacer. Such a person reminds Šurlin of Antoin Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and his specific relationship with his absurd environment. Roquentin experiences an existential crisis and an aggressive, but simultaneously reserved and controlled reaction to a meaningless existence. He inhabits a space which has long been subordinated to the rule of the majority, where people and things unconsciously reside in a perpetual state of limbo. Finally, aware of the time in which he lives, and in the framework presented at this exhibition, Šurlin points out: “It is entirely certain that, in a place where the ‘apocalypse of values’ is constantly perpetuated, where the ‘wasteland spreads’, a forgotten message echoes: ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world’.
Božo Kesić
Sameness in Difference, exhibition essay excerpt
This is an excerpt from an essay written for the exhibition called Oblike življenja / Forms of Life held in the Gallery Ravne, Ravne na Koroškem in Slovenia (2018).
Josip Šurlin directed his artistic work towards the translation of a segment of his immediate surroundings into the discourse of contemporary art. The absurdities of contemporary life are commented upon by the frequent usage of the method of simulation. Thus, in the installation called Ozymandias, he places an object shaped like a ficus tree in front of a “mirror”, yet, since both elements are made of steel that has been processed with nitrogen acid and motor oil, the primary function of the mirror is absent. The replication of form through a fundamental destruction of the expected original function is also present in a segment of the installation entitled Entrance. Six lamp-shaped objects are made of black-coloured steel, therefore, instead of emitting light, they actually absorb it. On the wall in front of the “lamps”, there are illuminated digital images representing a skull, taken from an anatomy atlas, with metal rods placed in various positions. The layout of the installation suggests a laboratory in some sort of clinic, whose function seems to be control and repression more than healing potential patients. His allusions to hidden narrative, which Šurlin reveals to the viewer only in segments, are also present in the work Birdhouse. The unease of shrunken space, which can be observed from a voyeuristic position only, is accentuated by sound and scent, through which the artist further conveys the feeling of isolation and exclusion, clearly depicting the individual’s position in contemporary society. In his latest works Procession and Avernus 055, the artist introduces textual elements as well. With inscriptions such as STAIRWAY, FIRE or SECTION 05, the author refers to warnings that can be found in public spaces, for example, in underground parking garages. The underworld, which is used again to exaggerate the already mentioned hidden systems of control, is also specifically emphasised in the title of the work created in the form of a book. With the choice of rubber and metal as the building blocks of the work, the topic of the post-industrial, alienated society is further emphasised, a society in which the individual looks for his path towards individual freedom outside the obsessive systems forcing themselves upon us daily, in this case, through art.
Jasminka Babić
White and Black, exhibition essay excerpt
This is an excerpt from an essay written for the exhibition called Oblike življenja / Forms of Life held in the Gallery Ravne, Ravne na Koroškem in Slovenia (2018). The excerpt was also used for the exhibition called Transit 2019 held in the Gallery Matica Hrvatska in Zagreb (2019).
For the work Procession (2018), Josip Šurlin attached metal plates onto a black background, like stylized hieroglyphs that designate the Western Desert, the land of the dead. There are words and numbers on them that reproduce some of the markings from underground garages. In a surrealistic manner, Šurlin combines what seems to be incompatible: the precisely structured ancient belief in the afterlife with the banal space of the underground garage. The artist’s book Avernus 055 (2018) is a pendant to Procession. The book, its pages made of one-centimetre thick black rubber, carries markings similar to those on the aforementioned metal plates. The book can be leafed through, the words and numbers printed on the black surface perhaps illegible at first sight. However, its reading is not unambiguous, but instead takes place by means of associations, which the author evokes with artistic signs and with the work’s title. Avernus is the ancient name for the volcanic crater near Cuma. The Romans believed that this is where the entrance to the underworld was, which is also described by Vergil in the Aeneid. Here as well Josip Šurlin utilizes both the title and the materials to connect the ancient and the contemporary underworlds. The ironic distancing from the banality of today’s world is the result of his daily encounters with the heritage of the Antiquity, the Diocletian’s Palace, which is to him an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The work Birdhouse (2018) takes the shape of a stylized bird house. It is made like a wardrobe in black colour. On the front side, there is a circular opening, through which the visitor can peek inside and perhaps experience the pain Paul Atreides felt upon sticking his hand into the Pain Box so that the Bene Gesserit could test his humanity. Scattered inside are rubber granulate, a coat, a lamp and clocks with only their second hands, moving loudly and intensifying the anxiety. The impression is reinforced by the smell of automobile tires. The deliberately shrunken space is a metaphor for the lack of space for the residents of Split, constantly eaten away by the monster of tourism. Birdhouse is an unambiguous critique of tourism, which destroys the environment, the residential space of local populations and, consequently, their culture and history. In the work Ozymandias (2017), Josip Šurlin provides broader content, both in its title and on the formal level, spanning from Ancient Egypt through Antiquity and English Romanticism to the present day. The sculpture is composed of a metal plate, processed with nitrogen acid and motor oil, and of a stylized ficus tree. Ozymandias is the Greek name for Rameses II, the third pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BCE and was one of the greatest rulers of the Old World before the rise of Mediterranean civilizations. With the title Ozymandias, the artist references Rameses II through the eponymous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), written by Shelley in 1818, when he learned that a fragment of the statue of Rameses II, weighing seven and a half tonnes, would be transported from Egypt to London. The statue arrived in London with the help of the arts dealer Giovanni Belzoni in 1821. The transportation of the statue of Rameses II from his homeland to London signifies the era of the great plunder of the remains of ancient cultures, which was encouraged by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. An enormous number of valuable artwork and documents wound up in famous European and American museums in the nineteenth century, where they are the main attractions today.
With the help of Shelley’s sonnet, interlaced with associations, Josip Šurlin builds a metaphor to describe the decay of modernist architecture in Split. In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Split underwent a great economic boom that left behind monumental modernist concrete architecture, which is decaying irrepressibly today, much like the heritage of Antiquity is decaying due to the invasion of tourism. The story of Ozymandias thus attains new dimensions and connects the fate of past greatness with current social problems pertaining to everyone. The works of Josip Šurlin speak about the sense of loneliness, about feeling lost, abandoned and uneasy. They speak of the obstructions to life, such as the lack of tolerance, discrimination, ideology and tourism’s destruction of the environment.
Jernej Kožar
Forms of Life, exhibition essay excerpt
This is an excerpt from an essay written for the exhibition called Forms of Life held in the Gallery SC in Zagreb (2018).
Regardless of the almost expressionless rhetoric of Šurlin's artistic expression, the one who knows him will find in his works a dose of dry humor and a desire to ironize, as a strategy for addressing a relevant issue. This type of Šurlin's mood is most pronounced in addressing the present, but for him the past also plays an active role in describing the current reality and is far from being something that people relate solely through nostalgia and similar sentiments. From this we can conclude that time is one of the unavoidable areas of interest in the axes of his artistic production. Ozymandias is an installation consisting of two steel objects of patinated surfaces that are placed opposite each other. On the one hand, we come across a stylized representation of a ficus as a representation of a plant that was regularly part of the standard "equipment" of an office or residential interior in the second half of the twentieth century; this representation is met with an imitation of a rectangular surface of a mirror. Both the ficus and the mirror are replicas of their real equivalents. Šurlin's sense of comfort that is inspired by the view of a typical modernist spatial arrangement is replaced by tense, cold interpretations of the originals, thus pointing to the inferiority of today's contemplation of space in the wider sense in relation to the same activity some fifty years prior. The humorous work of art comes from the confrontation of a stylized plant and the "mirror" from which it seeks to confirm its value, but the "mirror" itself is not competent in that sense either because it doesn’t carry out its original function. Another in a series of conceptually stratified and inhibitory minimalist works (in the scope of the serial and the simplicity of visual elements), In Vitro I is based on the criticism of contemporary living space as well. Using the principle of part for the whole, Šurlin, through personal items (in this case clothes), problematizes inappropriate and inhibitory models of life. Instead of hangers, the coats are suspended on aluminum structures that take over their function. Such a sight, which, by reproducing the garment carriers, becomes even more unnatural, and causes feelings of discomfort and various negative associations, especially if they try to be articulated with words (taking off, exposing, hanging, swinging at the edge, and the like). In addition, Šurlin surreally interprets the interior of the aluminum profiles as temporary constructions within which he is staying. These are the tubes, the tunnels in which one is subsistent, just like these imaginary spaces under the stylized gates in Giles Blatta and his Secret Passages. Entrance is a multifaceted installation consisting of three tables, with three pairs of lamp-like objects, with increased skull prints taken from the anatomical atlas (by R.D. Sinelnikov) to which the aluminum rails are fixed (allusions to craniometry). Entrance looks like an improvised laboratory with its unusual appearance, but this is in essence a space of absurdity, of twisted reality. As with the aforementioned works, the stylization method abolishes the original functionality of the object; so, the "lamps" do not light up or provide any sense of warmth or comfort that is usually connected to them. Similarly, the illuminated skull depictions within this shaped scenery lose connection with any discourse of anatomy and physicality. Entrance is a fictional space in which the rule of inversion governs, which completely captures the observer's attention and leaves it in wonder. Such a strategy of functioning is recognized by Šurlin in the relationship of an institutional order (eg. the State) towards an individual who, whether he wants to or not, is a part of it. For Šurlin, this is a relationship of manipulation carried out by ideologies and influential social groups, which stops individual development in favor of the stability of the system. The author sees this problem in analogy with Foucault's "repressive hypothesis", so the development of identity is perceived through the perspective of growth, or prohibition of sexuality which was particularly active in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Božo Kesić
Giles Blatta and His Secret Passages, exhibition essay
This essay was written for the exhibition called Giles Blatta and His Secret Passages held in the Gallery of Fine Arts in Split (2017).
Giles Blatta and His Secret Passages is a minimalist diptych consisting of spatial audio installations. It is the latest contribution to the subtle opus of Josip Šurlin, which consistently expresses an intimate yet measured correlation between the visual media and theoretical inspirations, built on a firm conceptual foundation. The visual-conceptual principle – a major feature of Šurlin’s art – is here manifested in a gloomy and purified ambience void of all excess or artistic gesture, which thus directly communicates the power of his artistic ideas. Without necessarily recalling all the dominant characteristics of hierarchically organized administrative systems that we encounter on a daily basis, one should say, first of all, that Giles Blatta and His Secret Passages primarily speak of the position of socially marginalized individuals forced to live a second-rate life for various reasons. The problems that are commonly communicated to the audience through publicly advertised artistic actions or noisy activist demonstrations have here been subdued to the pianissimo level in order to evoke empathy and a sort of existentialist cramp in the observer. This is because Šurlin’s art inspires a subtle understanding of human beings as powerless individuals caught in the open sea of life circumstances and constellations, where success or failure largely depends on the adequacy one’s social and professional profile, or even sheer luck. A key for reading the exhibition Giles Blatta and His Secret Passages can be found in the invisible protagonist of the same name, a fictitious person who opts for voluntary exile and disappears behind stylized metal boxes/doors. Disappointed with the violent and intolerant system, he becomes an embodiment of conformity in his escapism: renouncing at the comfort and safety of his home, he leaves in order to live his own version of life and the world by dedicating himself to repetitive actions such as cleaning a derelict building. It is a senseless process, an act of turning one’s back at the world, such as depicted in David Wojnarowicz’s short silent film called A Fire in my Belly (1986/1987). Even though the choice of the medium and the exhibition mode may seem unusual regarding the nature of the subject matter, it brings out the best qualities of Šurlin’s sensitive artistic expression and makes full use of the fundamental features of “total installation” such as practised by llya Kabakov: immersion and engagement with the presented story. Šurlin has created an environment that forces the spectators into the exhibition space by starting a dialogue between two dimensions, reflected in the physical division between “us” and “them” (since we cannot enter the area of the artwork). It is the opposition between the underground/marginal and the feeling of homely cosiness suggested by a carpet (the tackier, the better), and eventually the distinction between the visible and the imaginary. The artist has intentionally intensified the impression by adding sound as a sort of logos communicating the idea of the artwork. In that sense, one may say that the manifestation and suggestiveness of Šurlin’s visual language has been complemented by a repetitive and occasionally cacophonic sound background contributing to the feeling of disorientation and isolation of the subject, and adding new semantic layers to the existing interpretations, which results in a well rounded whole.
Partly inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the artistic installation of Josip Šurlin uses simple visual instruments to make a statement on a thin line between surface and underground, comfort and anxiety, familiarity and estrangement.
Božo Kesić