Irena Lagator Pejović

works

Directions

2014
Digital print on Fine Art paper, 53x80 cm (each). Ongoing series.
Present Tense - Dukley European Art Community, Budva, Montenegro. Curated by Petar Ćuković, 2016.
Photo: Irena Lagator

The work Directions is a photo series which I took in Montenegro that visualizes the critical highlight of the processes of limited responsibility in reality. The series show the directions of future roads which have never been initiated due to urban, structural or political problems. Thus for years they remain as elements of a "promised" development which does not happen, and of a suspended future between public promises, real possibilities and political intentions. They speak of the lack of unlimited responsibility in both, the individual and the power of the system.

The series visualize the lack of cultural, political and economic responsibility and presence of manipulation which clearly makes inevitable influence on the perception of the individual, and of society.

I am interested in making visible how the lack of social responsibility causes absurd and paradoxes which on the other hand open the field for critical engagement and potentiality for social emancipation. Noam Chomsky also spoke of the phenomenon of delay as a strategy of manipulating citizens, which announces the changes a long time in advance. The multitude thus does not feel the changes when they start to happen causing that the intellectual as well as physical spaces remain open for manipulation.

On the other side Directions also activates questions about the increasingly problematic tensions between our assumptions about what Culture and Nature are and should be. Making visible the critical "directions" I am interested in activating the perception of the citizen about the hidden structural powers that shape the reality without public nor transparent consensus.