One has to put in a bit of effort if one wants Julija Zaharijević’s exhibition “Admission” at the Kreuzberg project space Medium P. Only short opening hours permit the visit; besides the doorbell, nothing at the building on Oranienstraße indicates the existence of the off-space, which, after a thousand backstairs steps, spreads across a Berlin attic.
Only two works by the painter born in 1991 in Belgrade have been hung here between the beams by Antonia Lia Orsi, the curator and gallerist of Vienna’s “City Galerie”. An unusual decision that, if you engage with it, enables a rare exercise in seeing.
“Symmetry” is the space-dominating main work. So large that one automatically wonders how the painting managed to get up here (the answer, of course, is that it was rolled up and stretched there). In the manner of classical history painting — a genre traditionally reserved for men — Zaharijević interprets a photo of her high school prom.
Julija Zaharijević: “Admission”. Medium P, Oranienstraße 173, the back building, 4th floor, until March 31. Opening hours: March 2, 4, 15, 19, and 29, 2–6 pm
Unconditional Immersion
As a door opens here, in this Kreuzberg niche, a door through time and space, you stand before almost life-size, ghostly images of a silent group of young girls in the lobby of a Belgrade hotel. In their midst a strange Swiss Guard in traditional striped uniform.
Due to the slope of the attic there is no stepping back, no escape. You stand directly in the image. In the midst of these muddy colors, as if this pale pink were already wilted, in which Y2K dresses and pale flesh alike stretch across the canvas.
The gaze searches for the painter in the group, it stumbles over absurdities, over the interior of the surroundings, over awkward body poses, as they swept from glossy magazines of this time in the tens from America to Serbia. Over smeared makeup and greenish zombie skin. The longer you look, the more the image fragments.
What was initially perceived as a group fragments into absurd individuals, undead and clichés. No style can be pinned down, no truth discerned, the line is diffuse. The wholeness of youth dissolves, isolating into individual adult lives. The longer you look, the more you can discover and the more you can think. The title reverses itself. “Symmetry” is also a study of inequalities, of time, of patience and the fruits it can bear.
