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JULIA MALGUT

JULIA MALGUT

• EN In her work, Julia Malgut investigates situations experienced in everyday life, further questioning their relation with various social structures. Her spaces play with the audience‘s perception by placing complementary impressions in an indissoluble interplay: they oscillate between inside and outside, closeness and distance, unambiguity and suspicion by interweaving real with imagined spaces.
Malgut questions the structures of social hierarchies: subtle traces of power indicate something that remains hidden.
In ‘Pool of Tears - Every Tear from Every Eye Becomes a Babe in Eternity’ Malgut aims her attention to materials, a facet of work she priorities throughout her artistic practice. Associative values of fabrics depend on ones’ exposure to them. Hence Malgut plays with elements found in living spaces. In the artists’ opinion, such materials not only associate the audience to the time past, but also history and status, and are thus ideal when addressing specific aspects of viewers’ identity.
By creating a palette consisted of elements such as tiles or carpeting, Malgut invites the audience to a dreamlike state, which concurrently connotes to intimate situations. Moreover, she aims to create implicit ‘trust’, only to subvert the audience’s expectations. Consequently, Malgut transposes everyday items into surreal spaces, questioning our symbolical connection to elements presented.
‘Pool of Tears’ is a play on words and a simultaneous referral to the second chapter of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, a story tackling the ideas of self, size and proportions. Alice grows and shrinks, eventually ending up in her own pool of tears with a mouse.
Malgut translates these themes into a spatial transposition of a billiard table and scaled 8-Balls. By using carpeting to represent the table’s surface, she plays with associations to the material and overturns the expectations with the balls falling through the room.

Text by Duško Ruljević