Irena Lagator Pejović

works

Limited Responsibility Society Automatism

2012
4 columns: 68 paper citizen´s bill rolls with textual intervention by the artist; LED light, sound, visitor´s interaction
Dimensions: 420x400x700 cm
Exhibitions/Venues:
Irena Lagator Pejović: The Society of Unlimited Responsibility, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia. Curated by: Dejan Sretenovic & Una Popovic, 2012
Irena Lagator Pejović: Società a responsabilità limitata (S. r. l.), Villa Pacchiani, Santa Croce sull'Arno (Pisa), Italy. Curated by Ilaria Mariotti, 2012
18th Tallinn Print Triennial - Warm. Checking Temperature in Three Acts, Tallinn Print Triennial, Estonia, curated by: Rona Kopeczky, 2022

Photo: Ivan Petrović, Irena Lagator, Milan Kralj, Museum of Contemporary Art: Saša Reljić

In her ephemeral interactive installation Limited Responsibility Society Automatism, the artist starts from the international economic term SaRL (Socitété à Responsabilité Limitée). To create spatial forms reminiscent of ancient temples, she uses blank thermal paper bill rolls which in everyday institutional chain of global consumerism are used for production of fiscal receipts. She fills them with a textual content which is visually similar to the one we are familiar with, yet with an important conceptual difference. Namely, in addition to the original products and their prices, the artist programmed in the fiscal cash register certain intangible values such as feelings, love, memory… in order to assign prices to them. These new items are inserted between those we need existentially, such as water, milk or bread, thus becoming intruders within the established system of the trading world, so that on the hanging paper strips that fade over time the audience can read that in societies of limited responsibilities one can also buy knowledge, long love, experience, job, sunny morning, power, career, success, future... These textual compositions are typed using a fiscal cash register by combining the principles of surrealistic automatic writing, concrete and visual poetry. By unwinding the rolls and reading them, the audience simultaneously deconstructs the installation - the column as an element of a whole - while being confronted with dramatic moments of current social conditions, but it also becomes informed and aware of the process of growing trade in known and unknown means that becomes possible in times of orchestrated alienation, exploitative isolation and limited responsibilities.