Klasja Habjan / Dashes
Solo exhibition
The exhibition "Dashes" is a collection of literary and visual images in which graphics accompany nine short stories and eight poems. Both media, text and image, retain their own independent space in addition to touching and complementing each other. Sometimes, between these two narratives, with similarities and differences, it is possible to find a little more poetry.
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
Having taken on the task of writing something about her work, I cannot escape the fact that I know Klasja Habjan primarily as a graphic designer, after all, this is exactly what her educational background does, and it is difficult for me to get out of the perspective of someone who has been writing about design for years, trying to observe it in relation to the wider context of human creativity, with the context of society, everyday life, etc. This sometimes means re-examining the very content of the term design, and always with a certain rigor and returning to some definitions that succinctly describe what it is about. One of such definitions, that of John Commander, is often referred to by the British critic Rick Poynor in his lectures, and the definition reads: "To design means to create images that communicate certain ideas in a visual way and express messages whose form graphically embodies or emphasizes the most important determinants of the ideas that need to be communicated." Let's be clear, what Klasja Habjan exhibits at the Šira Gallery is by no means graphic design, what you see in the gallery is an amalgam of her short stories and drawings, images and texts, conceived in such a way that they, in the gallery environment, function as an integral whole. However, if we fold Commander's sentence about graphic design for a moment with what we see in Klasja's illustrations and read in her texts, it will seem to us that we are in the middle of interpreting a very similar creative process. The most obvious difference (if we ignore everything we know about design and what this sentence does not tell us) would be the character of the message, which in Klasja's case does not try to sell us anything or inform us about something we need to pay attention to, but design is not always and is not only in the function of communicating such ideas, it itself touches on the dimension of the amazing in its best manifestations and, to use Poynor's words again, sometimes it really gives us "knowledge about the exceptional nature of our lives". If we concentrate on illustrations, the author's intention is to capture, with drawing and graphic means, certain key situations, emotions and thoughts that each of the 17 attached texts carries, that is, to literally visually embody or emphasize their essential determinants, in the end the medium of illustration itself always moves within these conventional parameters. But the stories themselves are constructed in a similar way, the narrator leads us through them in an extremely visual way, with their visuality being built processually, gradually, element by element. Each fragment of the image acquires its visual form only when it becomes relevant to the story, such as, for example, the man from the story The House with the Willow becomes a dwarf in the third paragraph, when his relationship to the imaginary world within which he moves begins to acquire a clearer form. The author herself points to the analogy between the medium of text and drawing, choosing the same A4 format for both. Stories are built like drawings, at the beginning we are in front of white paper, and then this whiteness is pushed out and in these places one by one certain figures, images, ideas settle in their mutual relationships, which gradually become visible, to finally face their resolution. Klasja's stories are not stories with context, they usually have no references outside of the reality they create themselves, image by picture, with a lot of unreachable whiteness that is beyond the reach of the reader's imagination. Each of these pages is a single, carefully designed, world. Although the stories flow linearly, gradually opening up to the one who reads them, their narrative structure is such that at the moment they are concluded, they remain in front of us as a static image in which everything flows simultaneously on that A4 paper – the characters, their mutual relationships, expectations and the consequences of their decisions and their fantasies. Just like in the story about the "perfect" couple from the story Reklama, behind whom their entire imaginary life together flowed for a moment, only to finally find that they have been living all the time in a staged shot from someone's advertising art directorate. Although the project bears the rather casual name "Dashes", which does not indicate any special conceptual connection between the stories themselves, it seems to me that there is still a tangible connection between them. Almost each of the protagonists of these stories projects into the reality they inhabit with their obsession, idea, fantasy, something that would make their own existence in it meaningful, and their intervention also changes the nature of that reality, which ultimately embraces them, just like the willow from the first story embraces the house of a dwarf grateful for having guarded it for so long. At the same time, Klasja, as a narrator, communicates with incredible ease, without any excesses, in a symbolic and extremely visual way, every idea by which the protagonists of her stories create their own relationship to the world and try to make it more bearable, no matter how complex it may be. Sometimes it takes a whole page to do this, sometimes even one sentence is enough to visually encompass the concepts that are in front of us. Even such abstract, general categories as space and time, whose relationship is so simply visualized in the shortest story The Disappearing Shop: "I'm selling time, which I'm missing anyway, to buy things that take up space."
Marko Golub
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Klasja Habjan (Zagreb, 1993) is engaged in illustration, graphic design and writing. She graduated from the School of Design at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, majoring in visual communication, magna cum laude in 2016. She is the winner of the annual award of the Studio of Design for the self-initiated project Od(blok)iraj, a block for drawing, writing and research.
She has participated in several design and illustration exhibitions (Illustrations Talk in Oris, I'm Telling You a Story – A Selection of Contemporary Croatian Illustration at the Krsto Hegedušić Gallery, Crtomat, Illustration and Comics Festival at the Virovitica City Museum, International Laser Summit of Cheap Graphics in Lauba, The Other Side, traveling exhibition of interactive posters in Switzerland, 15/16 exhibition of Croatian design at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb...).
At her first solo exhibition in 2013 at the Skale do Sunca gallery in Stara Novalja, she exhibited the Sand City, her own story with drawings. At the exhibition Fifteen, 15 at the Living Atelier DK, as part of the FEKP, she illustrated the story of David Albahari.
In 2017, at the Šira Gallery in Zagreb, as part of the exhibition Books to Watch: Books to Read, he exhibited his version of The Emperor's New Clothes, telling a classic story in an innovative way.
In the same year, he published his short stories in the magazine Quorum.
Her professional work in the field of design, in collaboration with Zita Nakić, often includes original illustrations – such as the visual identity of the Takenoko restaurant, the design of the MSU educational manual Beginner for Conceptuals or the cover for the album Cinkuši: Cow on a Walnut.
Contact: habjanklasja@gmail.com
Illustrations: http://klasjahabjan.tumblr.com
Design: https://www.behance.net/klasjazita
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
The exhibition in the Šira Gallery can be viewed until March 5, 2019.
