Iva Tratnik - Totem and Tattoo

Iva Tratnik’s work has an archaic, (pseudo)mythological appeal. Torn between the extreme poles of life and death—affirmatively, ecstatically, yet also bewilderingly and fatally—it tells unusual tales that bear witness to the discomfort of the human condition. The paintings, tapestries and textile sculptures combined in the Totem and Tatu exhibition create a luxurious organic, fertile, and abundant atmosphere, which is at the same time in the process of decay, breaking, and disintegration. Skulls, open bodies, dislocated organs (dissecta membra), surrounded by vital, unbridled growth and budding, present us with a kind of oneiric scenography, which, in its affirmation of opposites, is akin to an ancient mystery that performatively enacts the paradox of human existence. This saturated mise-en-scene is rich in symbolism, attributes, objects of worship, which in their eclecticism and anachronism suggest that this quasi-ritualistic setting is enacting questions of permanent relevance. This is hinted at by the title itself; a paraphrase of Freud’s classic work Totem and Taboo, which explores the common origin of all cultures. Although Tratnik’s conclusions are quite different, the exhibition Totem and Tatu, like the book from which its title derives, takes place as a stroll through practices that strive to alleviate our fundamental discomfort of being human, more specifically, a woman.

Let us consider, for example, the Thirteenth Moon image, inspired by a performance with the group Hupa Brajdič, which places the moon with a precisely cut piece of its flesh in the primordial, Jurassic megaflora. This surgically split watermelon, with its open wound, shows the removed thirteenth moon, the last full moon of the unjudged matriarchy-bound lunar calendar, which has been replaced by Father Sun. This deep lack evokes the problem of incompleteness, a constant concern in Tratnik’s work, which records places where moments of symbolisation are carved into the flesh of the world. This longing for an impossible, never-achieved whole, which resonates nostalgically in the history of our culture, finds its echo in the work Janus Fleur, a textile sculpture with a satin texture, in which the female genitalia are surrounded by two phalluses. Although it is a reference to the cult work of Louise Bourgeois, in the work of Iva Tratnik, this sculpture begins to resemble a more ancient language, perhaps even that of Plato’s Symposium and the famous Aristophanes’ ode to Eros, which describes the double bodies and three sexes of the original people. Tratnik consciously places herself in the multi-thousand-year line of this type of mental “engineering”. Yet in her practice, these are mythologically and scientifically equal building blocks, necessary pieces of a never-completed composite. Thus, the monumental tapestry Parthenogenesis of the Future Self, vaguely related to the Manifesto of Cyborg Feminism and its prediction of the technological liberation of women from “anatomy as destiny”, functions as a complex contemplation of layers with paradoxical results. Rather than a euphoria of emancipation, the viewer finds in this work a strange diagram, a complex topology in which the positions of internal and external are radically blurred. Here, Tratnik discusses foreignness, regularly found in places where we would expect familiarity. This realisation that foreignness is an innermost concept profoundly characterises her work, full of interventions against the body membrane, our supposed shield against an external threat, revealing anything but a warm shelter of organic integrity. Instead, we are confronted by cold, mechanical constructions, and unknown, threatening formations dominate the space of the soft interior. The latter grows outwards, as shown by the displayed textile collages, in the layers and textures of which the boundaries between above and below are erased, in a synesthetic permeation, an almost indistinct, primordial mass. In fact, this kind of seduction of the visitor with texture works as a kind of enchantment, with which the artist simulates the gesture of a modern-day shaman. Allusions to the archaic ritual aspect are present throughout the exhibition, not least in the Anasirma collage, where a stylised display of female reproductive organs, reminiscent of a Rorschach test, revives the ancient apotropaic gesture of warding off evil by showing naked genitalia.

The artist is in fact a wizard. This is already pointed out by Freud in the work paraphrased by the title of this exhibition, which sees the magical world of art as an extension of the old animistic belief in the omnipotence of thought. We are also traditionally used to perceiving artists in this elevated, quasi-divine register, as distant mediators between us and things that we never fully understand. Throughout her exhibition, Iva Tratnik plays with this image of the artist, addressing it more directly in the diptych Still Life I and II, a kind of double portrait in which the unicorn, a mythical animal, becomes a symbol of the artist in her dual social position. On the one hand, a representative of the divine and a transcriber of messages from beyond, an (ethical) healer and social conscience (“heart on the sleeve”), while on the other, a neglected, marginal persona, shun by society. We could perhaps even go as far as to say the artist is the totem from the exhibition’s title, borrowed from Freud, who defines a totem as the phenomenon of attaching a collective guilt to a certain animal or plant, which thus becomes an object of worship and therefore should not be killed. And yet, every now and then, the totem animal must be ritually slaughtered. Moreover, we must do this collectively, as a society, thus reviving the mythical murder of the forefather at the dawn of time, and taking collective solace from this distribution of guilt. Does the artist, therefore, embody this collective victim, an object of idolatry, while simultaneously representing an eternal warning of collective guilt, condemned again and again to death?

Vladimir Vidmar