Freedom Security Progress, 2015
Installation
The spatial installation Freedom Security Progress is activating phenomenological and anthropological relations between language and culture, image and word, photography and light, memory and ideology, history and the present time, all of them in relation to the collective and individual responsibility that makes the reality. Areas of empty or “deconstructed” walls that here are defined by light and through which visitors can walk are used for a presentation of light panels with images. Those illuminated photo documents make visible the names of factories of corporate social ownerships like: Freedom, Security, Progress, Youth. At the same time, the installation contains archive images from the Museum of Yugoslav History that render the spreading of socialist ideas among country’s citizens from their earliest age – ideas of togetherness, of security, of progress, along with two images from the artist’s private archive showing collective visits to the WWII memorials. Photographs were taken in 1981 during the Gatherings of Brotherhood and Unity in Vukovar. In this installation an image turns into space and time shaped by an object of desire: of freedom, security, progress. Those diptychs of enlightened moments of an utopian culture speak about a given time, a character and expectations of the Yugoslav culture. On the other hand, by being horizontally displayed more as objects in space, they activate questions of ephemerality, responsibility, politics and paradoxes of convictions and ideologies that often turn out to be objects of constructed reality.
Irena Lagator Pejović deals with the issues of social, public and personal space, perception and social responsibility. By recreating social phenomena she is developing critical and poetic questions that can be summarized under her concept of the Society of Unlimited Responsibility. Soliciting the interaction of the viewer, her installations, videos and photographs reflect on topics like art as social strategy, inclusion of cultures, the perception and understanding of reality, individual and collective identity and the responsibility of society, directing the view, thought and feeling of the viewer towards the social issues that have universal values.