Peacestool

2016, sculpture; Bullet shells, wood, iron

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Venue: Exhibition Anechoic at Magistrat, Ljubljana SI; Exhibition Venice Stage at Chaos Gallery, Venice IT; Schmiede festival, Hallein Austria; Villa Manin curated by Butik Collective; Venue Carrozeria N.o.t., Rome

Curated by Alessandra Chiericato

Text from the exhibition Anechoic

The state of no echo captures the idea of absence, the unrecognized significance of
the significant. It becomes clear that the existence of the anechoic state is based on
the search for the echo. Like the position of dictators always reveals the trace of the
fact they are caught being their own prisoners behind their absolutistic function, so
are the personal battles hidden and repressed into the layers of the collective.

The position of a prisoner and a dictator seems interconnected as action and inaction, silence and echo. The authors answer the question about the existence of human
destructivity through their personal urgency and involvement which forces one to
explore what would rather remain hidden and anechoic.
The exhibition captures the works of slovenian visual artist Ana Mrovlje and the
israeli interdisciplinary artist Dan Allon. This is their second collaboration, their first
exhibition took place in Venice in 2016 as a part of the project B#side war. The
common ground of their work is the personal urgency and involvement in the war as
the reflection of relation to the personal, individualized destructivity. In her work, Ana
Mrovlje addresses the paradoxes of war and observes the state of resistence. She
questiones whether the mere persistence of existence creates resistence. Asking
herself about the battles from the static perspective reflects her work in the field of
psychoanalysis, where the social conflicts become personal in the collective
sediments in each of us. It seems like the world exists because of its basic state of
contradiction, the clash of the opposites. The opposites are draw together and what
seemed like destruction, then again becomes a latent state of equilibrium. Dan Allon
addresses the war through his video collage, filmed during his one month
performance. In 2013, Dan Allon resurrected a character he invented a decade
before as a way to cope with his military service in Israel, which opened a series of
artworks which were his primary practice in 2013-2014. The character, simply called
the dictator or the general, is a funny, incoherent and highly personal impression of a
dictator, which belongs, represents and reigns nowhere, and is based mainly on
appearance and performance of a dictator. Allon put on his uniform, and went up
there for a month, to concur the village in the act of Anschluss. In 2016, for an
exhibition at the Chaos gallery in Venice, he took that raw footage and made a video
collage and exhibited it next to the Peacestool installation by Slovenian artist Ana
Mrovlje.  This is his second cooperation with Mrovlje. In the exhibition the artists put
the visitors in the center of an artistic action, where they become the protagonists of
war in themselves which then again becomes collective in each of us.