Polygon, 2022
installation, collage
changeable dimensions
Polygon is an installation consisting of the collages created through an intuitive approach and by means of the free-associations method. By taking the images from printed media, a relationship is researched between visual experience and language, as well as the potential of alternative storytelling. In this collection of ruptures, fragments and layers, some unexpected coincidences and invisible processes emerge, which inspire a more complex experience of the world and valuing of hidden details.
Polygon – an arena for demonstration exercise
If we perceive reality as an arena created with a view to entertainment or military industry, the media space reserved for culture is deliberately given to uninventive individuals who maintain the status quo and beautify the necrophiliac presence. They address no one, mean nothing and don’t have a critical position towards the fundamental problems. This repels and humiliates people, so there is no sense left in this arena. In such an organisation of reality, the opportune logic works automatically, as a conveyor belt, and it endlessly searches for new sources of prestige and shock. Such entertainment is intended for petty-bourgeois audience and mediocrity professionals, delegated to provide theoretical explanation and blur the economic interest, and is almost devoid of any human or critical content.
The work Polygon by Šejma Fere is engaged and implies a radical subjectivity. This means being a human that feels something and doesn’t belong to the capitalist reality of lonely and scared individuals. Through a personal attitude, it demystifies the consumer world of spectacle, with discarded objects and memories, and provides an opportunity to re-establish communication. The artist develops her installation through stories of our fragmented existence and familiarity with the traces of contemporary society.
With her artistic integrity, Šejma Fere demonstrates that the most important are the individual and their own message. Everything else is a political manipulation created out of vanity, selfishness and subjugation, which represents the foundation of the consumer society.
Out of sheer joy, I dare suggest that her work indicates the awareness of today’s existential models and finding ways to exist outside these models. Joy is freedom. If a man is lucky enough to be free, then he is also alive.
Saša Stojanović, visual artist
Text for the catalogue of the 59th October Salon
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the Artist
Mining agreement: III-30-188/11.10.2023.
Inventory no: 188
Photo: exhibition of the 59th October Salon, Nemanja Knežević, courtesy of the artist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Šejma Fere (1981, Belgrade) graduated Painting and Graphics. Since 2004, she has had more than 30 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 150 group shows in the country and abroad, where she has presented her artwork made in different media (collage, drawings, animation, installation, graphic art). She received the Kolarac Heritage House Award for the best art exhibition in 2019; Special Acknowledgment for Painting of the Onassis Foundation, 2006; Artwork Purchase Award of the 2007 Vila Nova de Cerveira Biennale; has been a finalist of the Guasch Coranty Foundation award, 2015. She has been a member of the Association of the Visual Artists of Serbia since 2005 and has the status of a free artist. She lives in Belgrade.
www.sejma.jimdofree.com