Nikola Radić Lucati

"Monolithic memories" were taken on the eve of my own emigration, after opening a set of drawers, last closed by emigrated friends a decade earlier.

The exhibition "Odradek" was a self-regulated event assembled by the students of Bezalel Art Academy's MFA programme. in April of 2000. The participants were invited to submit their works to the Populus gallery and each other voluntarily. The artists and their works were subjected to treatment on which neither of them have agreed.

Yifat Laist & Nikola Radic Lucati

With:
Michal Ben-Tovim, Scarlet Hooft-Graafland, Mati Harel, Efrat Hildsheim, Avi Ifergan, Yifat Laist, Yaron Levi, Nira Pereg, Nikola Radic Lucati, Danny Reisner, Dina Shenhav, Simona Vaknin-Ifergan

The Participants

There are several ways to invite someone to participate in something, but none is as foolproof as the use of an "under-defined" term as a reason. The importance of the understatement as the form of the invitation is crucial for it's success; it is the silent guardian of it's own real purpose, as well as the catalyst for the cognitive processes of those that are subjected to it.
The important part in the induction of acceptance is, of course, the support for the very habits on which the target group bases it's activities. These habits are giving the participants sense of safety, since they feel that nothing wrong can happen, as their individuality has already been sacrificed to the "wider entity" at some earlier point in life. Thus "conditioned" and "already sacrificed" individuals are likely to answer positively to various undertakings, without giving much thought to the intentions, context and consequences of the event to be. For the participants, the visibility of the contextual field is lowered beneath the perceptual ability allowed by their ego. Their questions have already been answered and their gregarian instincts appeased by the very act of joining up.

This creates a situation where the network of meanings between the possible results remains open. Such "unregulated" field emphasizes the points of friction between the possible results, preventing them from advancing into their definitive, consequential form. This "field of meanings" of the participants works is only limited by the randomness of the psychological and cultural heritage that our subjects have been vested with, as well as the pressure and stress exerted by the rigors of artistic production. The role of the gallery in such circumstances becomes one of both the catalyst and the organizing principle that imposes it's own terms on the constellation of forces as they are aligning. The act of bringing the artworks into the gallery is the one of strategic positioning and conscious importance, the very kind that lowers the curtains of oblivion, enabling the gallery and the works to close the trap over their unsuspecting victims.