From July 15, 2016, until October 9, the project room of the MAN museum will host the project by Petra Feriancová, An exhibition on doubt , edited by Emanuela Manca.
Recurring themes in Petra Feriancová’s research are the exploration of the processes of perception of reality and construction of memory and the (almost never univocal) way in which they are completed. His works, through the use of different visual languages - installations, photographs, texts – reflect reality in a fictitious way and trigger doubts about the spatial and temporal dimension in which the spectator moves.
Even in the new installation created for the MAN in Nuoro, the artist introduces a multiple space-time that opens up to multiple interpretations, a mixing of eras and places through which to reconsider the ways of enjoying reality and art.
The viewer will have the impression of being in a traditional ethnographic museum that illustrates the life and crafts of Sardinia. The objects on display, presented as artefacts, will in reality be replicas of common tools, oversized and handcrafted with different materials compared to those traditionally used. The change in scale and material characteristics make the objects clearly created for pure aesthetic contemplation, through a process of canceling functional uses. Untouchable artefacts, relics of which, even before finding their initial function in shared knowledge, only the form is perceived.
The exhibition therefore materializes the idea of a distant island, using exclusively Slovak elements – craft objects, photographs of folklore and popular festivals – determined by natural and cultural conditions surprisingly similar to those of Sardinia (shepherding, customs, music, instruments ). The artist’s goal is to demonstrate that, just as our understanding and interpretation of history can be contested, in the same way what appears to our eyes can be persuasive even if non-existent or based on false imagery.
The typical idea of Sardinia is therefore uprooted and questioned here. Each representation of places is an indication of a precise reality, which the artist, in the space generated by doubt, nevertheless manages to transform into a metaphor; a process of personal interpretation that connects individual experience and learning mechanisms conditioned by history and culture. Forms, images and traces of the past are welcomed in the awareness that their original meaning has long been degraded or lost, but precisely because of this distortion of the “original” meaning, one can question the vision of reality, redefining one’s own version of the world.
Petra Feriancová’s work was selected by the MAN Museum on the occasion of ArtVerona 2015, as part of the Level 0 project, which some of the most important Italian contemporary art museums have joined. The exhibition is organized with the contribution of Slovak Art Council.
Petra Feriancová was born in 1977 in Bratislava, where she still lives and works. He works mainly with texts, photographs and installations. Winner of the 2010 Oskar Cepan prize for young visual artists, organized by the FCS Foundation for a Civil Society, she has exhibited in numerous institutions including: Fondazione Morra Greco, (Naples, 2014), ISCP International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York, 2011), Brno House of Arts (2012), In 2013 he represented Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the 55th Venice Biennale with the project Still the same place .