Romana Nikolić / The Right to the Garden
Solo exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
"When you type the term vacation into the Google search engine, the pages that follow are filled with locations that offer the tired observer Eden – Sunny Vacation, apartments meaningfully named My Way, vacation in the mountains, vacation in the spa... And then, submissive and grateful, from the 365 days of the Gregorian calendar, we take 7 of those who should heal our souls, offer time for creation and everything else that the concept of vacation by definition implies. Sea promenades, hotels, glitter, and the human spirit remains tired of everything that needs to be listed, carried, filled, extinguished, and having arrived at the destination of its (desired) bliss, it remains unfulfilled. On the other hand, if my garden is entered into the same, let's call it an impartial search engine, the first result is offered to the excited crowd My Garden, My Imagination. In the beats of nightmarish everyday life, where the pace of life is determined by the increasingly dynamic demands of external self-fulfillment, existential problems and social situations, in which all tomatoes are the same size and the only visible nature is a few trees planted along the side of the road on the way to work, the metaphorical garden as a place of creation and introspection through work becomes a real luxury that few can afford.
Romana Nikolić's gardens arise from the awareness that the essential need for an oasis of peace, the enjoyment of one's own food or artistic expression and creation is an elementary human right. In the spatial installation Right to a Garden, Romana transforms the gallery space into a grassy space for rest and enjoyment in which she goes on vacation, in order to dig up and plant lines on the white walls from which the outlines of her metaphorical and literal garden intertwine, reflecting on the reality in which, despite all efforts, artistic expression and research have become an absolute luxury. By emphasizing the reverse process, starting the installation from blank surfaces of stretched papers on which she leaves linear traces of plant motifs in a performative and introspective process, the process of self-fulfillment that occurs through artistic planting, digging and creation is also outlined. In the process of such growth, the installation also includes all those whose right to their garden has also been taken away – self-imposed or caused by external factors; it invites them to plant their own garden, to intervene in the existing one, or simply to rest, read a book or find a moment for themselves.
Despite the realistic understanding that the garden is an exception and that we will return to the worlds of the boxes of shiny, soil-free vegetables in the store and operational everyday life loaded with pleasures and excesses, the struggle for the right to it should be stuck in the cracks of the brain, and its manifestation can be on the scale of large glass arboretums or just a short black line drawn on the whiteness of a smoke-filled evening."
Marija Kamber
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Romana Nikolić was born in Zagreb in 1992. After graduating from the School of Applied Arts and Design, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2011. She was the winner of university scholarships for excellence in 2013/2014, 2014/2015. During the acad. year. In 2014/2015, she was awarded the Commendation of the Academy of Fine Arts for her successful work. From 2015 to 2017, she was a member of the quality assurance committee at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She graduated in 2017 from the Department of Teacher Education in the class of Prof. Daniel Kovač, with an award for the best graduate. She participates in the 2. International Scientific and Artistic Symposium on Pedagogy in Art held in Osijek in 2017.
She exhibits at about twenty group and three solo exhibitions. In addition to her artistic work, she is the co-founder and secretary of the "Ethnoteka" Association, within which she leads four independent projects in the field of cultural tourism. She worked as an expert associate at the Tanay Art School and the Maksimir Center for Culture and Information. She collaborates with the publishing house Profil Klett, where she is the author of the art textbook "I Perceive, I Shape" for the 6th and 7th grade of elementary school. She leads art workshops for adults at the Zagreb City Museum, and since 2017 she has been working as an art teacher at the "Tin Ujević" Elementary School in Zagreb.
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 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 December 16, 2019.