Group show at TROTOAR

Not all moments can be overcome. Some wrap themselves around us and cling there – heavy and hardened. Some things pass, others do not; they settle in deep and ask us to endure.
 
This exhibition is shaped by the experience of retention, of remaining with what overwhelms us. It does not search for resolution nor action, but rather inhabits the sediments of time. The works of Ines Matijević Cakić, Zlatan Vehabović, and Nikola Vrljić articulate waiting – the ethical act of staying with what cannot be rushed, resolved, or forgotten.

Vehabović’s Leviathan (2013) calls to mind the invisible cost of comfort. The song My Donal, narrated by a whaler’s wife, tells a story of loss. She addresses “Ye ladies wha’ smell o’ wild rose,”^[1] reminding them that their perfume, extracted from the bellies of whales, is paid for in blood, fear, and solitude. It contrasts the brutality of departure with the uncertainty of those who are left behind, performing the emotional labour of waiting.

The heaviness of an inert body bears down on the painting’s atmosphere; the impossibility of action described in the poem is now pressed into the decaying matter itself. There is no heroic hunt, no romantic, wide-open sea. There is only the flat line of the ground and a monumental carcass, beached and discarded as excess. The scene exposes a fissure in the relationship between society and the environment – what John Bellamy Foster calls the “metabolic rift”.^[2] A resource torn from the ocean has become a vast, viscous mass emerging from the rupture of systemic exploitation. In gazing at Leviathan, we are not observing nature, but the consequences of our own needs, trapped in a time that no longer flows, but slowly sediments.
 

For Nikola Vrljić, enduring means being left with a fantastical loss. His Trophy (2017) is an inventory of wrecked imagination. We are faced with the oversized head of a unicorn. It has been severed. What was once a symbol of unparalleled purity is reduced to an artefact mounted onto a trolley cart. The work rests on a chilling paradox: the unicorn is visible only to the innocent, yet to prove it has been sighted, it must be captured. Innocence is verified only through the act of its own destruction. This myth has become the roadkill of folklore, a casualty of our drive to own the unattainable. Placing it on a cart completes the demystification; the unicorn is no longer a mystery to be guarded, but rather a heavy load to be shoved into a corner as soon as it ceases to be interesting. Such was the transaction: we traded our imagination for a tangible object of achievement.
 
The Trophy does not represent a victory; it is the flaunting of emptiness. It proves not that the unicorn existed, but that it can exist no longer. Caught in the space between desire and appropriation, the sculpture becomes a suspended act of waiting – a fixed moment in which the myth is maintained only through its own loss.
 
Pulling the weight of the outside world into the intimacy of the body, Ines Matijević Cakić’s Matrixial Narratives (2011–2014) offers quiet counter-narrative. Through nine drawings created in the real time of pregnancy, the cycle functions as a repository of protracted time. A combination of diary and visual notes, it transcends documentation to become a method of self-observation; we are not gazing at a depiction of events, but rather at an anatomy of a process. Here, pregnancy is defined not as a heroic feat of creation, but as a practice of staying.
 
In scenes of chaotic domestication – where a tamed she-wolf occupies a kitchen chair, a house of cards teeters on the brink of collapse, and the braids of a mother and her daughter unravel into one another – the pregnant body renounces its wholeness. It appears only conditionally, in fragments, visualising an integrity undermined by the presence of the other. Lisa Baraitser dubs this “Enduring Time”^[3], an experience in which motherhood is neither linear nor productive. Woven from standstills, demands, and endurance, such time leads to no external goal, but to the persistent maintenance of a relation. Refusing to reduce motherhood to biological automatism, the artist examines its full weight – as a complex, exhausting, and deeply transformative labour.
 
Members of the same generation, Vehabović, Vrljić, and Matijević Cakić react to our collective exhaustion by withdrawing from grand narratives of progress and embracing a realism of privacy. This is a deliberate shift in scale: a move toward micro-histories and intimate mythologies. Whether they are deconstructing spectacle, digging through museum archives, or mapping the home, the emphasis rests on the materiality of the work itself. Offering no promise of conclusion, these works act as a brake on time, lingering with what is lodged in the layers of the everyday.

Author: Martina Rodrigues

^[1] Owen Hand, “My Donal”, a Scottish song from the 1960s (it refers to ambergris, an ingredient used in perfumes).
^[2] The term “metabolic rift” is used by Bellamy Foster in reference to the consequences of industrial exploitation in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press (2000).
^[3] The terms “enduring time” and the ethics of care are based on Lisa Baraitser’s research in Enduring Time. London: Bloomsbury Academic, (2017).