Curator
Petja Grafenauer
The Missing (Screens) is Sašo Vrabič’s directorial debut. In the white cube of the Ganes Pratt Gallery, it is not a film that is shown but a spatial installation that uses the elements of direction to capture all the senses of the visitor. Images, objects, smells and sounds completely take over the perception of the one who enters it. The installation uses some elements of creating a filmic narrative, which is realised in the project in three dimensions and various media. The totality of the experience takes place in a two-part framework, which is not a linear narrative and not an image of a Hollywood spectacle, but rather a reflection of the representations offered by advertisers and directors of big-budget films.
The title hints at the origin of the spatial installation. The Missing (Screens) originate from media reports about the abduction of the four-year-old girl Madeleine McCann, which took place on 3 May at a hotel resort in Portugal. The large media campaign that followed the event encouraged the artist to research the field of child abduction. The spectrum of human fascination with childhood and children, which is conditioned on the one hand by the stereotypical media-mediated symbolism of childhood as beauty, cuteness, purity, innocence and happiness, creates a surface under which another, much darker and more terrifying side is concealed.
Sašo Vrabič’s project explores the instability of the meanings of images and other message elements that make up the installation. The images are placed in a system conditioned by the mutual relations between the parts of the installation and directed by the artist. Images torn from their original contexts offer completely new interpretations. That whish is lovely reveals itself to be horrible and distorted, and usually becoming a sign of the innocent and lovely. An image is an empty sign that cannot retain its original meaning in the created system. It, too, is therefore kidnapped. The director of the event, the artist, exploits and caresses it in order to present the impermanence of its meaning.
