ELENA ŠTROK / SUITE ABOUT THE BORA
By immersing yourself in these prints, new emotional worlds open up inside us.
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
Elena Štrok's artistic practice establishes imaginary worlds that are placed in a time beyond the present. In the construction of these worlds, Elena uses a multimedia approach in which each separate materiality reveals different dimensions of a certain reality. The Suite of the Bura borrows the name of the format of a musical composition in several movements, parts of which materialize through video, lithographs, screen printing, sound, performance and a book. They intertwine, but also function independently as units that complement each other. Depending on the occasion of the presentation, the parts of the Suite of the Bura may or may not appear in a certain space, and thus make up a work that is constantly in the making, and its basis is a story set in an imaginary future. In the world of this story, the sea has covered most of the land, and many winds have left the land. We follow the relationship between two researchers who are trying to penetrate the matter of the new world in order to clarify questions about the origin of the world and the reason why life exists, and what it looked like once upon a time. They communicate with each other with their thoughts and have different priorities and experiences of the world (which is manifested in the exceptional graphic design of the text and authentic dialogues). Surrounded by the vastness of the open sea, they float on a raft with an orange tree, hoping to find the Bura, the oldest wind left on earth, which will provide them with answers.
"During the long years away, the word 'home' obtained a different meaning. They weren't sure they could align with the semantics of the past anymore."
If we were to interpret the Suite of the Bura as a dream in Gestalt therapy, we could imagine all the characters as parts of the same person. This suggestive method is especially interesting if we place ourselves – the observer, the reader – at the center of this interpretation. Then all the mystical figures – the bora, the two women floating on a raft, the sea, schools of fish – become fragments of our consciousness in which we can inscribe meanings. The bora, for example, can be the energy of change that we eagerly await. The two women represent two poles, both of which are pulled to their side, impulse and caution, emotion and reason, language and matter. Their mission is to penetrate the symbols that are created when the surface of the sea meets the bora. These shapes, resembling microscopic cross-sections, lead them to penetrate the fabric of the world and understand their language. These symbols are recorded in the graphics that surround us. Their mysticism and recognizability – similar to the dialogues of the researchers – can be seen as a contact with the everyday, and yet unfathomable. Imagine yourself on a raft, on the open sea, facing your own polarities. If you inhabit one pole, the other will resemble an enemy, and their relationship will resemble a conflict. If you occupy both poles at the same time, allowing yourself to oscillate fluidly between extremes, you will probably get a little closer to the chaos of existence and the elusive.
"From a certain point of view, it was their stubbornness slowly killing them: erasing, through their self imposed solitude, most known social constructs after generations of humans have fought so hard to maintain them. People need to be fostered by illusions – bare reality is impossible to look straight in the eyes"
This ecological catastrophe of the imagined future is very much the (speculative) result of real processes in the present, injuries and changes that occur caused by human activity on Earth, exploitation, pollution and abuse of natural resources, and disruption of the balance. This capitalist treatment of the Earth has already resulted in climate change, global warming and poisoning of waters and climate, and it is no coincidence that Elena Štrok constructs a world in which even the winds leave their natural habitat in order to find clean air. We can only hope that this speculative fairy tale does not predict the future, but points to an alarming situation, and encourages us to imagine/create/practice fresh and disobedient ways of dealing with the world.
By immersing yourself in these prints, new emotional worlds open up in our inner beings. Orange-pink evokes love for me, blue-green outlines the depths of the Adriatic Sea in which I grew up, and pure blue is sadness. What do you feel at the moment of observing? Disobedient shapes that vibrate on paper are a meeting of two great forces of nature, wind and sea, the Bura and the Adriatic. Their play temptingly draws us into the taste of salty air and the feeling of frostbitten and wet skin, while standing in the gallery surrounded by works. Following the dialogues of the two researchers, we will experience both doubt and discovery, and finally, with the protagonists, we will come to an unexpected denouement. Among the waves, they will encounter not only questions of their own existence and the truth of the world, but also of their relationship with each other and a hint of what connects all living beings. The moral of this story is to believe the collapse and if we find ourselves alone and freezing on the open sea, in search of meaning and truth, sea currents and winds will bring us home, which is actually closer than it seemed.
"The space around them glitched for a moment, as Bura changed the course of her thoughts. She was unexpectedly amused."
Elena Apostolovski
All quotes are from the book The Bura Suite by Elena Štrok, 2024.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Štrok (1996) is an intermedia artist and designer originally from Varaždin. The basis of her artistic practice is image and experience-making, whether on paper, screen or stage. From graphics to scenography; from performance to writing, Elena creates hybrid media specialized for the realization of individual narratives.
She began her artistic path on the classical guitar, and after graduating from high school of music and high school in Varaždin, she enrolled in the study of graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Mirjana Vodopija. She completed the same study with honors Magna (BA) and Summa cum laude (MA). The last semester of her undergraduate studies is in Prague at the Academy of Fine Arts as part of the Erasmus+ exchange. After completing that stage, she goes on a professional internship in Porto, where she helps lead a residency program for artists within the DeLiceiras organization. On 18, 2024, she completed her second MA, Re:Master Opera, at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, where she continued her education in the direction of creating performing arts in a collective.
So far, she has exhibited or performed at various venues in Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and HDLU in Zagreb (HR), the Dutch National Opera and H*art Museum in Amsterdam (NL) and the OKNa Gallery in Porto (PT).
The exhibition at the Šira Gallery can be viewed during the Gallery's working hours (Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., 6 p.m. – 8 p.m., Saturdays: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) until 31/12/2025.
The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb.