Here & There

The photographic exhibition presents the author's two new photographic cycles united in “spaces of absences”. An abandoned Hutter textile factory or MTT, located in the industrial area of Maribor, an empty, aesthetic and yet traumatic space is placed in visual dialogue with its seeming antipode, a spectacular tower, the Donau City Tower in Vienna, the highest building in Austria. It is a design complex, a space without a single trace that could be read as a post-industrial adventure factory.

The photographic series with deliberately exposed spatial situations, stresses the basic principle of the author’s work, in which she distances herself from her objects of desire and transforms them into a series of documented looks. But in the negotiating of these two unexpected feelings of absence, we recognise the space that defines and shapes the artist “here and there”.

Mirjana Rukavina, born in Maribor, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and art pedagogy at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Maribor. In the 1990s she transitioned from painting to video. Since 2002 she has worked largely in photography, which she often transforms into spatial installations. She has exhibited at various independent and collective exhibitions and participated at video festivals. As an artist in residence she worked in Vienna and Berlin. Currently she lives and works in Vienna.

The exhibition is part of the “Project space” programme. The programme is composed of smaller, shorter-run exhibitions chosen on an annual open call basis and which take place in the west wing of the Fužine castle. The exhibitions are co-produced together with partners and must follow the criteria for uniformity of heritage in the fields of architecture, design and photography.