When talking about nature in the city, we normally think of carefully landscaped and tended, aesthetic greenery. But there are always also the overlooked or ignored areas associated with post-humanist spaces: used up and destroyed plots of land, fringe areas, undeveloped or abandoned zones, or places that are in the process of losing their function – gray areas that nature ends up repossessing to create new environments and conditions for its renewal. Nika Erjavec uses such situations to continue her research and experimental project revolving around the “new” wilderness rapidly filling in the gaps of emptied spaces, creating the so-called fourth landscape. Through spatial relations established by objects made of selected materials, she constructs a corporeal experience composed of various sensory stimuli, especially by exploring the dimensions of vibration, light, and sound as contemporary media in sculpture to investigate the multilayered issues of the current social and environmental crisis.

The artist’s focus on the ontology of objects, underpinning a material associative field she creates, is apparent in her use of mundane, disposable, everyday (sound) ready-mades to directly refer to our consumerist culture of objects aimed at creating ever more needs. The elements of her installation include various raw building materials in combination with objects of leisure and natural materials, dry plants gathered in various degraded or abandoned urban areas, such as construction sites, neglected lawns, and strips along roads and railroad tracks, where synanthropic and invasive alien species grow.

Toy mechanisms and other electronic components added to the objects, as well as the artist’s focus on visual, audio, and vibrational perception, intensify the visceral sensations affecting the body directly and without consent. By challenging the limits of our perception, the vibrations and flickering of the image evading sight, the extremely rapid strobe light revealing the hidden color spectrum, and the sounds suddenly cutting into space, point out the invisible and hyper-objective, doing this through the matter they need to flow. In this way the artist ensures that these objects are perceived as vital elements, encouraging the agency of things by creating effects that are both dramatic and subtle. The installation thus functions as “vibrant matter”, as Jane Bennett calls it in her book1. Things become “things” with “powers”, informing a political ecology. In the gallery space, the plants and the objects move around, uniting and combining, and in doing so they also move us.

Intermedia artist Nika Erjavec (1994) received her bachelor’s degree in applied arts and a master’s degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana.

In 2019, she received the student Prešeren Award given by the Academy of Fine Arts and Design for the (in)Visible series of installations and hybrid art research. Over the past ten years, she has exhibited at various solo and group exhibitions in galleries and in urban and rural spaces in Slovenia and abroad. She occasionally works as a set designer, prop designer and theater photographer, and won the Bronze Medal of the Serbian Photographic Association at the 62nd Sterijino Pozorje Festival. Together with Doroteja Erhatič, she has a permanent interactive installation titled V/posluh at the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana. Since 2022, she has served on the curatorial and mentoring team of the Lighting Guerrilla Festival. In October 2024, her interactive light environment Cellular Landscapes will be permanently installed in the outdoor pavilion in front of the University Clinical Center Ljubljana (a collaborative project of Prostorož, UKCL, and Forum Ljubljana).

This exhibition is part of the Draught series of exhibitions presenting young artists and fresh ideas.

Notes

1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter, a political ecology of things, Duke University Press, Durham, 2009.