Sandra Sterle is working with the processes of performing and multimedia installations based on experimental film structure. Figments of Time is focused on her ongoing practice of biographical research, archiving and self-archiving in linear and non linear forms of relating to documentation and memory.  Her discourse revolving around her relationship with her grandfather formulates a non-linear film-structure with installation units that can be seen as separate entities or fragments that are assembled together to form a single unit. A possible layer of her long term project and current exhibition is an attempt  to read her own art practice through her granfather’s biography. (From the text of Olivia Nițiș)

Sandra Sterle is visual artist who works in the media of installation, multimedia, film, photography and performance. She graduated from the sculpture department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1989 and continued her studies at the Department of Film and Video at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, 1995-1996. (in the class of Prof. Nan Hoover). Her works were performed in numerous public spaces and exhibited in national and international art institutions such as: Museum for Modern Art, Arnhem, Gate Foundation, Amsterdam; Gallery W139, Amsterdam, Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; IGNIS, Kulturzentrum Koln, Art Gallery, Split, Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdansk, Location1 Gallery, New York, Artist Space, New York, etc.

Her artworks are part of several public archives and museum collections such as MMSU, Rijeka, Art Gallery, Split, the city of Zadar and private collections.Sandra Sterle is a professor at the Department of Film and Video, Academy of Arts, University of Split. This exhibition is part of a long-term multimedia research project, started in 2013, called Reviving Grandfather.

Collaborators on the project:

Andrea Kaštelan (camera), Dragan Đokić (montage), Dijana Mlađenović/ KINEMATOGRAF (production), Dan Oki (montage), Hrvoje Pelicarić (sound), Ivan Perić (KAZIMIR), Marko Grgić (sound recording), Đildo Bavčević, Tibor Keser (subtitles)

Book: Irena Bekić, Oleg Šuran

Workshops: Irena Bekić, Iva Markulin, Boris Tenšek, Emilija Pipi Piljek, Slaven Kolarec, Ela Đimoti, Linda Tarnovski, Maria Carmen Čipčić, Vladimir Ryzhkovskyi, Luka Jokić Sterle, Armida Sterle

Input to the text: Ivana Meštrov, Maximilijana Barančić

Curators: Olivia Nițiș, Martina Munivrana

Production: MSU

Exhibition design: Olivia Nițiș, Sandra Sterle

Exhibition set – up: William Linn

Visual identity: Sanja Kuzmanović

Thanks: HAVC, Ivana Andabaka (HDLU Zagreb), Branka Benčić (MMSU Rijeka), Dina Bušić (grad Zadar) SICU  

Sandra Sterle,  Figments of Time

Sandra Sterle is a multimedia artist who is working with the processes of performing and multimedia installations based on experimental film structure. Figments of Time is focused on her ongoing practice of biographical research, archiving and self-archiving in linear and non-linear forms of relating to documentation and memory.  Her discourse, revolving around her relationship with her grandfather, formulates a non-linear film structure with installation units that can be seen as separate entities or fragments that are assembled together to form a single unit. A possible layer of her long-term project and current exhibition is an attempt at reading her own art practice through her grandfather’s biography.

Time is a figment of collective imagination. Sandra Sterle has been developing a project of time deconstruction, research, self-archiving, and memory landscaping around the relationship between the artist and her grandfather. The stories he told, the various languages he spoke (Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Italian) made him a man of a certain context influenced by the traumatic experiences of the Second World War. Reality and fiction intertwine only to go beyond questioning facts and embracing the mixture, the fragments, the figments, and to open a neutral territory in which personal and collective memory, ideology and geopolitics are only in the background of a far more important contribution to existence: the unlimited possibilities of imaginative narratives. This form of repair through means of technology comes to heal the wounds produced by the rigors of reality, where perception cannot and should not be erased and where the limits of the brain dictate the order and chaos altogether.   

The image of the man and the story of his life are a form of reconstruction. Through her research, he becomes the impossible task of writing a linear history. He is the genuine reflection of our limited capacities of keeping and treasuring wholeness, and yet the proof of our unlimited abilities of abstraction. Sandra Sterle works with the paradox of coexistence, with a non-chronological concept of time as formulated by Deleuze – a formal network of processes. The fascinating stories told by her grandfather – about the space program, military findings, war camps, art treasure from Zadar almost being transferred to Venice – are based on facts combined with fictional constructions, or to quote the artist herself: “some things can only be told through fantasy.” She is also collecting elements like hair, soil and plants through the hands of other people. This process draws upon the concept of a universal museum coined by the Russian proto-communist philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov in the 1880s and 1890s. In his futurist perspectives, the mission of the museum is to actually resurrect by encompassing all the lives of all those who have lived before, a cemetery-like museum, a complete testimony for investigators and a collection that can be used for individual resurrection.

The exhibition trajectory has the purpose of underlining the mechanisms of storytelling and the concept and substance of non-linearity. Upon entering the space, one experiences an entire process of reconstruction, from the video of a workshop inspired by the therapeutic method of family constellations, followed by excerpts of text from the cinematic discourse on display, by a processual, interactive book, elements of personal archive, videos that work as a form of retracing and re-enacting through a selective sequence with a constant mixture of relaxed roleplay, meditative behaviour and genuine research. The final film is an unclosed chapter in itself. It underlies a significant moment to discuss the layers and values of fiction and oral history within histories, chronologies and periodisations. Historical narratives are sources of information, but they are also the surfaces of a mixture of layers that intersect different perspectives, memories and empirical evidence. The connection between collective memory and social identity creates a bridge influenced by the power of ideology in shaping the hierarchies of event importance. Identity and collective memory are mixed with myths and folklore, with personal and collective emotions that shape collective consciousness. In this context we must pay attention to a wide range of sources when we are dealing with history and memory, from oral histories, first-person accounts, documents, photographs, and other traces of the human experience so as to allow the coexistence of variables and shared experiences of time.

Olivia Nițiș