The exhibition by Croatian multimedia artist Amela Frankl, titled “...just like that, to the horizon!”, was officially opened at the Dubrovnik Art Gallery (Umjetnička galerija Dubrovnik) on Thursday, 29 October. The exhibition explores the artist’s stay on the African continent, in Mauritania.
Since 2019, segments of this project have been presented as standalone exhibitions in various Croatian museums and galleries, including the Museum of Arts and Crafts and the Josip Račić Gallery in Zagreb. The project was displayed in its entirety at the Fine Arts Museum in Osijek and the Galić Salon in Split. The exhibition arrives at the Dubrovnik Art Gallery in its most lavish iteration, enriched by new works created this year.
At the opening, Tonko Smokvina, director of the UGD, congratulated the artist and thanked the entire team at the Dubrovnik Art Gallery for another successfully executed project. The exhibition’s curator and museum advisor at the UGD, Dr Rozana Vojvoda, emphasised that the new works address the Mauritanian space and its impact on the author’s entire artistic practice in a somewhat different way, with a dose of melancholy and in a different key.
In some works, such as Diary from the Edge of the Desert (2019 – 2021), the possibility of rearranging and creating different relationships is immeasurable. Of 150 photographs, we have exhibited around fifty. The author creates a creative chaos, a kaleidoscope of faces, urban genre scenes, atmospheres and landscapes, while simultaneously inserting temporal and spatial loops – photomontages in which scenes from Mauritania are interwoven with those from France, which is also her home, scenes from her native Zagreb, and even those from Italy and Greece.
Amela Frankl explained that her stays in Mauritania, the encounter with a different world which she later compares to the ancient Greeks, all those acquaintances, that intense physical contact with landscapes, the winds and the sand that stings the skin, have in a certain way permanently marked her life. The exhibition title, which is no longer 'Black Glass on the Road' but '...just like that, to the horizon!', speaks of that echo which in some way makes sense in the new projects as well.
Amela Frankl is a prominent visual artist, present on the art scene since the 1980s. She last presented herself to the Dubrovnik audience in 2001 with an exhibition organised by the Art Workshop Lazareti. The realisation of the exhibition was made possible by the City of Dubrovnik and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia. You can view the exhibition in the Gallery until 13 December.
