Aleksandar Duravcevic. Steppenwolf

About

Steppenwolf presents the artist’s latest suite of sculptures, paintings and drawings created since Duravcevic’s presentation for the Pavilion of Montenegro at La Biennale di Venezia 2015, entitled TI RICORDI SJECAS LI SE YOU REMEMBER. “Time can vanish without trace [but the] time we have lived settles in our soul”1. So describes Andrei Tarkovsky the barren landscape of time – a void he contrasts with the profound depths of human memory and imagination, infusing the past with purpose. In Steppenwolf, Duravcevic returns to investigate duality and time. Here, the past – though riddled with clues towards an identity – seems as infinitely mysterious and unknown as the future. Steppenwolf trips through the halls of Duravcevic’s memory palace, crossing lunar creatures with phantom youth, cold flames, mythological animals, warrior cults, monuments to heroes, flatlands, magic mountains and mirrors. If time is immaterial, subjective and spiritual, then, Duravcevic asks: does time exist only in one’s soul? The “wolf trots to and fro”2 pacing his homeland in his dreams. Longing for his birthplace has driven him to madness. But his birthplace is no longer. For death’s sake, everything has changed. The place we once belonged to, like Eden, has disappeared and we are all refugees. Our warriors have been silenced; our monuments, from marble, have changed to light. Without memory, all is time-less, place-less, name-less and home-less. Duravcevic’s time is a nomadic ghost ship constructed of phantom limbs and memory devices sailing between Illyrian coasts. It is a journey littered with vestiges of empires–Austro-Hungarian, Holy Roman, Catholic, Communist or otherwise – an odyssey through a desolate, chimerical steppe.