Igor Čabraja / Fragments
Reward of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Department of Prints and Drawings
of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
7–31st July 2015

Exhibition open:
Mon – Fri 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Sat 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.

The exhibition entitled Fragments, mounted at the Department of Prints and Drawings, presents the newest print artwork by Igor Čabraja, laureate of the 6th Croatian Print Triennial and winner of the Reward of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2012) for his sequential (self) portrait polyptych entitled No name.

Igor Čabraja, approaching the threshold of mid-life, feels ever stronger the pressure of the inevitable Tyranny of the Time, which urges him to make a new inventory of memories, inventory of human lasting, counted by precious moments (R. Barthes). Tracing 'archival prints' based on items from a long-lost diary (2009), he continues a personal recapitulation of life in his new work – Fragments (2015) from the angle of remembering things (J. Assmann), adding the optics of family three-generation existential horizon (A. Assmann).

Considering identity as a set of memories, the photograph – in Susan Sontag’s words a proof that a given thing happened and a souvenir of daily life – together with its phantasm, becomes the basis of Čabraja’s procedure of a new materialisation of memory. Searching through the 'storehouse' of personal and family photographs, as well as through the universal repository of remembrance – the Internet, he reaches out for the proofs of his reality, appropriating them. The discovered models are fixed by using the technique of aquatint and printed on paper, materialising thereby the aquatinted 'proof' of memory.

Thanks to the use of the representative modality of rhizome, the vortex of inventories of Igor Čabraja’s fragments portrays – by the interweaving of layers of time, space and types of memories – the inheriting of the souvenir of his self.

Separate 'anthological' biographems (R. Barthes) present the 'pictographic' phantasm of reality, foreseeing the Cioranesque FUTILITY – the impossibility of real synthesis (F. Jameson) of the systematisation of memory and remembrance. The Demon of the Time – Oblivion occupies our personal mental archives daily by playing, tossing and stealing thereby archival items from (memories of) our lives, leaving chaos and loss behind.

(from the Foreword by Ana Petković Basletić)