Alen Šimoković is an artist from Rijeka who presented his recent works at two city locations. Despite the dialogue between the two exhibitions, each of them is a rounded whole. The first exhibition was opened in Croatian Association of Artists’ Juraj Klović Gallery and is called “Babel”. The “Babel” series is dominated by a graphic line that was created on the traces of old, preserved calligraphic stencils that belonged to the author’s father. By using them, the artist created images from letters and words without meaning. It gives a view of the current world that erases communication boundaries, and yet we understand each other less and less in it. Noise, murmur and confusion prevail. Ever since the time of the Babylonian catastrophe and the linguistic disintegration, mankind has not been able to find a common language. More precisely, it found room for misunderstanding. For Šimoković, this language breakdown and misunderstanding are one of the root causes of the first migrations. This is the point where Šimoković’s works from the “Styx” series are created, dedicated to migrations into the unknown, and are exhibited in the Sugar Palace. In contrast to the monochrome of “Babel”, in this series the emphasis is placed on the colourism of the surface in order to question migration as an all-time global topic, with which suffering and cruelty go hand in hand. Or, as the artist himself said, maybe every misunderstanding and disagreement, every dissonance that leads to migration, is just a harmony that we do not understand?
The curator of the “Babel” exhibition is Ervin Dubrović, and the “Styx” exhibition is curated by Ema Makarun. The exhibition in the Juraj Klović Gallery is open from April 11 to April 25, 2023. The exhibition in the City Museum is open from April 11 to May 7, 2023.
