Collages - Handicraft With Words

Svetlana Slapšak’s collages are obviously a secondary product of an
artist who enjoys combing words to such an extent that colours sometimes also
become necessary. By choosing a modest and un-pretentious collage technique,
which she believes is adequate for an amateur/child, and by placing her
creativity into ‘the mystery of cooking in the afternoon’ she plays with the
ideological directness of this technique, with its propaganda potential. But
instead of a clear message, her collages are misleading and cause false
interpretations in which a feigned naivety is only the first trap. Observers
slowly become acquainted with a world of risky changes and ironic jumps; they
are shown how much of their attention is actually demanded from them, so that
finally they are expected to do exactly what they did not expect - the
authority of knowledge. Instead of transforming everyday objects into the
unusual, Svetlana Slapšak’s collages transform unusual objects into the
everyday: symbolic, prestigious, artistic, texts difficult to understand, formulae
for the well-informed. Two types of spatial organisation may be found in her
collages. In the first, plans and designs for a ground plan (archeological
finds, cities, maps) are combined with vertical surfaces; so the ground plan of
Euripides’ theatre becomes a semi-circle of the burning sun for an imaginary
horizon, and an unknown Athenian house becomes the setting for the apotheosis
of poetry created in the naive style of Greek handicrafts. In the second she
constructs imaginary landscapes and interiors, theatre boxes and frames which
interact, and in this confinement she produces melancholic meanings. Culture
and gender and probably the most melancholy invention of people - nature,
appear in these collages in their ultimate, ironical hypostasis.