Constructed Realities

by Irena Šimić, art historian and Gestalt therapist

Published in the catalogue of Katarina Radović's exhibition Constructed Realities in NOVA Gallery in Belgrade, September 2013

There is always a threatening abyss in what they create. They disturb you even when they are joyful, and leave you discontented even when they laugh. What is inside them is not serenity, but only comedy. /…/ These sorts of people find pleasure in gazing in depth, commotion, analysis, attack, ridicule…

                                                                                                                        (Béla Hamvas about artists) 

Humour is one of the constants that make Katarina Radović’s photographic oeuvre coherent. It is quirky, sophisticated, intelligent, and often dark, parodic humour. Laughter produced by parody is not the simple-minded, carefree laughter that can claim to have healing properties; there is something malicious about it – something that makes us laugh and gives us the creeps at the same time. Parody is amusing because it refers to something normal (normalised), in comparison to which the parodic image is comic (Frederic Jameson). However, that is not all. This understanding of parody implies that there is the original, on which the exaggerated imitation of its unique features is modelled. But what if the original does not exist? What if the model is also a copy (like the doll from the series Constructed Realities or the plush rabbit from the series Desire), a failed implementation of the presumed archetype (anima or lust)? Then we are entering the terrain of a special kind of parody that is truly subversive and disturbing because it reveals that the normal, as a measuring instrument and an anchor in the world, does not exist (Judith Butler). We can go further than that and, like Katarina, disrupt the boundary between reality and fantasy. We can notice that the doll in the photograph is imitating a woman that is imitating a doll, or that there is no essential difference between the pair of plastic feet offered on the plush cushion and a pair of feet attached to someone’s legs, as an object of fetishistic adoration. The comedy of the mannequin doll that is removing the hair from her upper lip and the cut sausage on the leash, positions us before a threatening and gaping abyss where the last foothold in normality (the boundary between the real and the imagined) sarcastically vanishes.