Tanja Radež: DUST COLLECTORS (Slovenia), misterious composition

Tanja Radež, a visual artist and a self‑proclaimed ostalgist, likes to spend her private and professional time digging through recent past or its material remains. As a designer, she is arranging all her findings, as visual quotations, into new, original constellations, thus marking them with the personal and the contemporary.

Artist residence in Istanbul provided her with the topic of emotional materialism and reminded her of all the dust collectors – which are abundant in Istanbul. The exhibition will gather combined domestic and international objects, which perhaps once had many roles, but of which only two remain today – collecting dust and evoking emotions, most notably nostalgia. The location itself is a dust collector ­– former tailoring shop where master Žika used to work for decades is now an empty space. Even the letters on the display window are all sad and dusty. Remnants of the past, dust collectors … But when we move them away from their usual place, they leave a gap behind: a dustless spot on a shelf, a less faded wallpaper on the wall, a hole in the heart. If fear is hollow inside and empty outside, nostalgia is full inside, and stuffed with dust collectors outside. Since objects can only live in relation to people, the exhibition will be toured by people who know how to swipe off dust and give objects the space and significance they deserve.

Author: Tanja Radež
Producer: Alma R. Selimović
In collaboration with: ZRC SAZU, Festival Indigo, Muzej in galerije mesta Ljubljane
The misterious composition was created as a result of the art based research by Tanja Radež within the trans-making project.

The mysterious composition will be open every day from 4.00 p.m. – 8.00 p.m., until 13th September 2019.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n°734855.