The artistic practice here stems from the process of appropriating found, often overlooked objects within the gallery system—such as antique furniture not chosen by the gallery itself or standard pedestals that make up the permanent inventory of every institution. By photographing these objects and subsequently reapplying the images onto their surfaces—so that the image literally overflows and “spills” onto the floor—a situation is created in which the image attempts to imitate reality to the point of complete fusion. However, in this attempt at imitation, the work reveals an ontological rift: the two-dimensional nature of photography and its fixed character inevitably fracture upon contact with three-dimensional space.

The central problem of the work lies in the technological aporia of visual representation—the difference between the screen image, generated by pure light, and the printed object made of pigment, which possesses a tactile form. The process of capturing the “true” color of the floor, which even included physically taking a sample of the material as a reference point, ironizes the inability of digital and printing machines to ever fully replicate immediate experience. Regardless of the precision of calibration, changes in lighting or viewing angles within the gallery expose the photograph as unstable visual information that remains a mere interpretation. Here, the image ceases to be a transparent window into another world and becomes an opaque barrier that, through its imperfection, emphasizes the materiality of the medium.

When image transmission attempts to take on the properties of physicality, it actually highlights its own construction and boundaries. The work reminds us that our perception of reality has always been framed by technology and that the truth of the image is not found in its transparency, but precisely in those points where its imitation fails. Ultimately, the work suggests that a return to a pure, media-unmediated reality is impossible, as the boundary between the original and the simulacrum is constantly being redefined through the technological filters that surround us.

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The threshold of image and reality

On the unstable nature of scopic field in the works by Ana Petrović

Krešimir Purgar

By immersing themselves in the complete transparency of the visual experience, digital communication technologies allow the viewer to lose the sense of the image as he or she was previously acquainted. Image science must notice the consequences of technological changes insofar as ontological questions about images today are shifting from the philosophical to the purely practical domain of everyday life. New problems arise despite the fact that even the fundamental ones have not yet been fully resolved: we are still unable to answer the question “what is an image”, because we either think that this question still resonates with too loud metaphysical overtones, or because we believe that ontological reflection on images can only follow – and not influence – the changes that are happening faster and more significantly every day. How, indeed, can we know what an image is if the conditions of its production and consumption in our time follow completely different paths in relation to different historical periods and their specific pictorial ontologies that seemingly constantly change? The aporia set in this way – namely, that our understanding of the world necessarily occurs either through philosophy or through technology – is facing serious difficulties today.

            Spotting a fundamental, enduring, and timeless dispute over issues related to people’s ability to perceive and understand images suggests the necessity of new dilemmas. One is whether the images are objects in themselves or are they pure transparency? In other words, are they opaque bearers of signs that refer to something outside the images, or is it possible to know their essence in an immediate way – as immanence and presence? I think that the works of Ana Petrović can serve as a prolegomena in contemporary theorizing about images and that they allegorically explain the dramatic changes that have occurred in both image technologies and our experience of imagery in general. To explain what this is about, allow me one (again allegorical) digression that should confirm that all images function in the same way, and what distinguishes them concerns primarily their institutional position which in turn does not affect their ontological status.

            Kaya Silverman in her book The Threshold of the Visible World (1996) argues that Lacan’s concept of the screen as a scopic field needs to be revised to include an expanded idea of ​​culture. She thinks that the screen, understood as something that stands between the viewer and the subject of her or his representation, is a real medium that reflects the dynamic relationship that produces the view within the scopic field. One of her original insights, which relates to Lacan’s theory, would consist in redefining the “gazing triangle” of the famous French psychoanalyst. She talks about the greatest importance of the subject of representation and the moment when the latter looks back at the competing observer, ie the other who watches him; she argues that when the observed object takes the place of the subject in relation to the person being observed, in fact both at the same time (both the observer and the observed) become “objects” in relation to the latter. Namely, the retreated gaze leads to an extremely unstable situation in which the gaze always creates subjectivity, and being seen always leads to the objectification of the subject – to a simultaneous status both as an “eye” and as a “spectacle” (221).

            In that way, the gaze of the one who looks is determined to the same extent, within the scopic field, by the one who gazes back – the object of representation becomes the subject and viceversa. By adding another diagram, inverting it and superimposing it over the first one, Silverman puts greater emphasis on the dynamics of crossing gazes claiming that the one who is been looked upon becomes in turn the observer himself. What mediates between two simultaneous gazes is precisely the “cultural screen”, or the camera “through its alignment with the gaze” (135). I would like to advance this perfectly plausible argument by asking the question: Is it possible to see on some example how this Silverman’s double diagram, in which the looker and the looked change places in turn, actually works? I would like to propose a photograph, more precisely an advertisement for Levi’s jeans which, to my opinion, describes exactly what Silverman is talking about.

            What we see is a very unusual ad: there is no product shown at all (except for a small logo on upper right part of the ad) and there is no depicted enjoyable situation whatsoever or face to which a consumer would like to identify with (all we see are two angry policemen in a police car looking at us – hardly a pleasant thing to anybody). So, this ad definitely doesn’t work in a way we expect an advertisement to work, that is, through identification with pleasurable situations or familiar but distant faces (like celebrities, sport players and other individuals we would like to see in person but never have the opportunity). Instead, the image on this ad shows in a realistic manner the dynamics within the scopic field of an average “looker” – of anybody of us. The policemen in the ad represent what Silverman calls “the social gaze” which is focused upon us and which makes us feel photographically “framed” (135). By analogy, the subject of the picture are not only two policemen, at least not exclusively them but us, the bearers of the simultaneous look.

            This image, probably as its most important aspect, shows the function of the “given–to–be–seen” and our exposition to other’s gaze as a fundamental point for self-identification, not just a mere objectivation. By looking this image we don’t identify with the object of representation to whom our gaze is directed without him/her returning the gaze (which is how most of the ads work) but with ourselves, because the ad implies that wearing Levi’s jeans we, and not somebody in the image, become that usual suspect to whom the policemen’s gaze is directed. This is, of course, just a politically correct commodification of the Medusa myth adapted to the non–conflicting medium of the traditional world of advertising that became extinct with the advent of technology that made it possible in the first place. But we are interested in something else here: how to show that the world we see is not just a cultural construction (ie philosophy, from the aporia mentioned at the beginning), but that the visibility regimes through which we experience reality have always been a matter of technology, regardless of the stage of its development.

            The main feature of the latest works of art by Ana Petrović, which were exhibited in two selections at the Rub Gallery in Slavonski Brod and then at the Knifer Gallery in Osijek, is problematizing physical space in relation to the space bounded by image media. Namely, we perceive image media in everyday life as a way to transform three–dimensional physical space into two–dimensional and then “transferred” or, better said, represented, in another place and at another time. Traditional painting, but also photography and film, and especially modern electronic media, have accustomed us to experiencing the transmission of visual information in a discontinuity that we consider natural. This means that we interpret areas of encounter of space and media, such as the edge of a screen or a projected image, as a necessary cut between that what is there and this here, between before and now, reality and representation. In doing so, we do not pay attention to the fact that reality is limited only by the possibilities of our scopic field, while the reproduced image is limited by the technological predispositions that make it possible at all. In other words, people have always had to abstract from their own scopic field in order to be ready to understand the logic of any visual medium at all.

            Ana Petrović’s works deal with key problems of visual cognition of reality: the limit of man’s field of vision, the role of media–mediated images in the demarcation of reality and representation, and the difference between reality and its image transmission. Of particular interest is the author’s activation of the observer’s gaze, which erases the boundaries of the “fourth wall”, the barrier that separates intra–image and extra–image reality. Unlike the previously described situations that only imply the existence of someone or something outside the image, in the works from the Bite Size series the traditionally untouchable space of the image penetrated reality as a third dimension, as real presence and immanence. In his 1930 work L’immaginaire, Jean–Paul Sartre argued that one of the most important characteristics of images is that they offer the “illusion of immanence” and that only human consciousness allows to be aware of both images as mere objects and images as representations of something not really present. In order to be able to imagine using images to see what is not really present, we must be able to step out of the real world and observe it from a distance. According to Sartre, the perception of an image is possible only if we are not in the image. But what if we are in the image, completely or only partially?

We recognize the artistic transcendence of Ana Petrović – for example, in two works from the Bite Size series – in the fact that they do not fit perfectly into any of the existing models of representation and because the author’s intertwining of immanence and illusion of immanence is their main theme: since artworks combine real things and the pictorial representation of things, their object is not simply present but not entirely imaginary; it is not entirely real but neither is it virtual. They are “on the edge” of what can be technically visualized and what can only be imagined; the problem of defining boundaries and the ability to experience the difference between immanence and virtuality today is a key issue in both image philosophy and visualization technology. The thinner the cut between two incomparable realities, the harder it is to distinguish between the natural world of things and the world of simulacra. Traditional techniques of representation, from painting, photography and film, made this cut first drastic and then less and less noticeable.

The works Opposite Direction, Cutting and Triangle are on a similar track of reference to the edges of the media. In them, the author takes us back to the boundaries of a two–dimensional image in an extremely simple but visually striking way. The edges of the screen, the surface of the wall, the combination of screens and readymade objects remind us of the basic laws of any representation: namely, that it is always different from reality, and if it is so similar that we can no longer recognize the difference, then it is no longer representation. If this does not seem to be a particularly important issue, it is worth recalling one replica from the first season of the TV series Westworld. One of the characters arrives at a high–tech amusement park, a replica of the Wild West, which – alongside the tourists seeking a hyperrealist experience of sex and violence – is inhabited by (seemingly) perfectly designed humanoid robots that move, behave and communicate according to preassigned narratives, that is, computer algorithms. Prior to entering the park, after the visitor had asked one of the hostesses whether she herself was real, her answer went something like this: “If you can’t see the difference, why does it matter?”

When the medium itself becomes an art theme it means that a return to the real world is no longer possible. The journey of no return began in the period of historical avant–garde and early experimental film, and is being completed today. Paradoxically, it was the “desublimation” power of art (Herbert Marcuse, Man of One Dimension, 1964) at the beginning of the twentieth century that pointed to the blurring of boundaries between art and reality, just as the real world is only possible in art today. Ana Petrović’s works draw attention in various ways to the medium itself, to technical images that we consider to be an extension of our senses and that we expect to be invisible, to merge imperceptibly with the medium. By effectively using stylistic figures of irony and metonymy in video installations, photographs and readymade objects, Ana Petrović brings us back to the material aspects of media and reminds us that media (re)construction of reality, which we think is credible, is actually only sensitive and volatile visual information. This artist prepares us for an age in which reality will no longer be limited only by presence and physicality, reminding us that we may no longer be on the edge, but may have already crossed it.

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Let’s Look Closer

Natasha Kadin

The works of Ana Petrović to be exhibited in Split—Triangle, Torn Time, Star Sky, Other Reality, and Cutting—suggest by their very titles the fundamental thread of Ana’s artistic research: combining different media to create a new reality. In her works, the artist combines photography, video, sound, and ready-made objects, while playing with the installation itself. She presents objects found within the photographs in their physical form within the space, or alters them in various ways, thereby playing with the viewer’s eye and, in a sense, stretching or introducing new dimensions to the media in which she creates. A shared vision present in every work is a unique approach to reality in order to emphasize the display of the visual, which is multi-medially manipulated, tilted, rounded—exceeding standard frames at the boundary between reality and representation, actuality and its visual transmission.

Art often combines reality and its representation, situated somewhere between what is technically possible to visualize and what is only possible to imagine; the problem of defining the boundaries and the ability to perceive the difference between immanence and virtuality is a key question today for both the philosophy of the image and visualization technologies. The thinner the cut between two incomparable realities, the harder it is to distinguish between reality and the world of simulacra. Traditional techniques of representation, from painting to photography and film, initially made this cut drastic, then increasingly less noticeable. Following a similar path of referencing the edges of the medium are the works Cutting and Triangle. In them, the artist—in a simple yet visually striking way—returns us within the boundaries of the two-dimensional image, but that is only at first glance. Let us look closer. The edges of the screen, the surface of the wall, and the combination of displays and ready-made objects remind us of the fundamental laws of every representation: namely, that it is always different from reality itself, which is precisely what the artist engages with and draws our attention to in her works. She prompts us to look more carefully, more closely, more in detail—showing that the visual is broader than it appears at first glance.

In the catalog Ana Petrović: On the Edge (Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, 2022), Krešimir Purgar discusses Ana’s work by comparing it to an interesting detail from the first season of the series Westworld: “One of the characters arrives at a high-tech theme park, a replica of the Wild West, which—alongside tourists seeking a hyperrealistic experience of sex and violence—is inhabited by (seemingly) perfectly designed humanoid robots that move, behave, and communicate according to pre-set narratives or computer algorithms. Before entering the park, after a visitor asks one of the hosts if she herself is real, her answer was something like this: ‘If you can’t tell the difference, why does it matter?'”

In her video installations, photographs, and through ready-made objects, Ana Petrović warns us precisely about where we draw the line today between the real and the imaginary, whether we want it to exist, and how clear and/or necessary it is to us. We already live in a world of simulacra, in a society of the spectacle, and it seems to me most important to have our own boundaries—or to decide not to have them and surrender to all the visual and other stimuli that constantly surround us. Ana shows us the way she plays with them.