Curved Hourglass —
by Djordje Aralica

Description:

Featured in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgOtV6mVLFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_bak4e3_HA Djordje Aralica: WaterAirTime New chains by Djordje Aralica! On this occasion, world constitutive elements – water, air, and time – presented in the title as a single ideogram, are appropriately packed in elementary forms of a bottle, glass, ball, and hourglass. Their expanding, spilling, and flowing content acquired the shape of its glass or leather receptacles, transparency, or elasticity, of which does not disguise its changeable character. Instead of these predictable materials, the artist introduces a curtain of chains, devoid of any utilitarian purpose. Once again, we submerge into Aralica’s, at first sight, l’art pour l’art, manipulation of his appealing medium overwhelmed by visual impressions: verism, detail, texture, material, as well as the unexpected transformation of ideal form. His hourglasses also conceal a small audio event: the artist’s time–sand in a form of an internal chain converts the hourglass into a rattle! Suddenly, all the glasses, bottles, and balls start ringing, bubbling, and fizzing in our ears, revealing thus their real content. Is this Aralica’s laconic wit that celebrates the easiness of life, escapism, or lightheartedness, or could it be a call for discerning a curtain which separates us from that which imparts meaning to our existence, and which beats, breaths, boils, and leaks independently from us? Marina Mihaljević, Ph.D. Art Historian