The Promise of Truth. The Portrait of a Mother / The Path of All Living. Self-Portrait

A duo of similar, but not identical, pairs shoes in the middle of a low-edged wooden rectangular tray, an allusion to the actual urban rectangular fountain with a modernist sculpture Deklica s piščalko by Stane Jarm (from 1963) located on the square in front of the block of flats in Kočevje where the artist and her mother lived. However, these completely ordinary pairs of shoes, placed in two wooden frames, cannot be touched in the gallery’s glass case. A visitor can't help but think of the Duchampian approach which the artist firmly opposes: “In art, the representation of the reality is an attempt to dig deeper in its essence. Such an attempt is a promise that art will deliver truth about the world. This is not my authentic personal belief but has to do with the culture I’m born into. This body of work isn’t a reflection on that belief; I simply take it as a common cognitive frame which attunes me with the rest in the field of art.”

Therefore, the diptych is a narrative of a personal biography with a broader cultural meaning that the artist touches upon with subtle portraits of her mother and herself; the portraits illustrating what was different and the same about them, their gender and cultural formation. The artist points to the cultural, psychological and physical bonds formed between them which are personified by a pair of shoes; walking, movement, moving each of them alone and the two together. Walking which cannot be interrupted by her mother's death. That's why there are just shoes and there is no body; the body is present in the footprints. (Lilijana Stepančič)

Organisation: City of Women, Zavod za kulturo 21; In collaboration with: Alkatraz Gallery.

Free entrance.