JAŠA turns his attention towards an old hotel in the seaside town of Piran; what we end up with is a philosophical examination of transient private and collective spaces. The monumental project, NoWhere / NowHere in Art Hotel Tartini has been conceptualized and realized as a site-specific work of art as a whole. A meditation on the relationship between art and architecture, hotel and guest, utopia and reality, possibility and the impossible; various elements come together to create an overall experiential narrative.
An existing architectural frame holds within it a concentration of bygone times, a history of people that once where, a space so extremely over-layered with the material, a heavy presence of an accumulated past, a blank slate that still holds memories and emotions of the no more. A challenge is presented, an archeological approach of sorting through physical layers and metaphorical traces left behind. A search for utopia begins. The impossibility entices a more significant challenge. Does this ideal space exist or is it just a figment of our imaginations?
The instinct is to strip it bear, make it white, rip it raw, a blank canvas. Whiteness becomes the starting point, an immaculate theme that lingers beyond and into what will be. Strip it bare in order to see and hear. Feel. The whiteness holds the air, not only for a new imprint to be embedded but permits light and air to seep in. A state of surreal emptiness allows listeners into the rooms.
Does the space define the art or does the art define the space? For JAŠA, it is a constant dance, an intricate back and forth, both of which are approached with responsibility - the result being what had to happen.
“I came up with rules to only break them eventually so I could breathe into the material, giving them an autonomous life, to embed a certain attitude and approach.”
With his central large-scale glass installation, JAŠA subverts the emotional experience of the viewer. The beauty of the sublime, an unbearable lightness, a presence of a constant threat. A statement that is as much aesthetic as it is political. A half a ton of broken glass is suspended from the ceiling upon everyone that steps in. This frozen rain hangs in the heart of the space, its democratic center, accessible by anyone and everyone, visible from all angles, it is the common ground. Walk bellow a plethora of broken glass, an inevitable unpleasant feeling of threat permeates, an intentional balancing of beauty and menace that further ripples throughout the whole.
Walls and floors that whisper. An interchanging of whispers, of sporadic bits and parts that elude to a narrative, but never a logical narrative that one would expect. The tale is what traps the visitors there, in NowHere. The entrapment is sincere, a sincere act of curiosity. “When the eye opens to curiosity, you hear whispers that you never heard before.”
“My work is about enduring within a certain situation, allowing the ephemeral to mold reality as long as possible.”
In his manifesto, Wayne Koestenbaum positions the hotel as a space for possibility, posing the question, “Does one check into a hotel or does the hotel condition check into you?” With this monumental work of art, JAŠA entraps the viewer within his narrative, a place of pure poetry where writing disappears. Invisible writing. Writing on the walls. A place of fiction, of fragments, of quotations and palimpsests of what was, what is, what will be. A place where both dragons and little mice fly. A narrative that arises from the need to overcome the dictum of “I miss you”— how to give more words, shapes, and colors to the empty spaces standing in between us, between us all. To inhabit it with something else. The reality. NowHere. Within the actual architecture and structure of living, the ephemeral becomes an experience of a palpable orchestration of elements that bring the “NoWhere” into “NowHere.” A piece of broken glass can be turnedfrom a discarded element into a new luring sculpture; its reason is light, its rhythm is time. Poetry does define life, and when it does nobody is short of greatness.
- Mitra Khorasheh and JAŠA