Although the artistic practice of the sculptor Ivana Radovanović has predominantly gravitated around the medium of sculpture, the conceptual starting point of her work has always been engagement in terms of focus on specific social contexts, which she perceives as critical and determining in the wider context of her local socio-cultural narrative. Her earlier works, such as the sculptures from the cycle “Hollow Men” or the obelisk “Sugar obelisk - Au revoir Montenegro”, reflect her approach to questioning and interpreting social phenomena, which include the widest range of collective, national identity values. In that process of artistic research and plastic expression, her need for a different form of expression was only natural – evolving into video work, which became a formal method of interpretation of selected narratives, alongside spatial installation. By questioning her own usual practices of artistic expression, Radovanović endorsed all the possibilities offered by the expanded field of art, which led to the creation of “Keep at 58 F or 14 C”. This piece represents a synthesis of a documentary film and a ready-made object that scrutinises the current socio-political events and the sociological context in which they take place.
Structurally, the work consists of a documentary recording of a public event - the enthronement of Metropolitan Joanikije in Cetinje in 2021, and empty boxes for storing and transporting bananas, stacked on metal carts for cargo transportation, through which the documentary recording is projected. The boxes are arranged so that a hole, an empty space, is left gaping in the middle of the composition, the opening of which prevents the visibility (projection) of the metropolitan's face. Consequently, in the constant movement and dynamic flow of events in the documentary, his figure remains in the dark, illegible, invisible, empty, hollow. The symbolic articulation of this artistic procedure is clear and concise; using targeted, simultaneously formal and ideological means, it reflects on, or rather questions, broader aspects of established national-cultural, sociological and ethical identity values, which are all embedded in the immediate reality. Such conceptualisation of a work of art aims at demystifying or deconstructing the established ideological values of the community, transposing their content into the spectrum of profane, banal, everyday iconography (banana boxes). Through appropriation of publicly available media content, its dominantly ideological-political narratives are criticised and questioned, thereby defining a far more complex sociological and cultural character of the wider social context, which is the focus of the artist’s research. One particularly visually explicit instrument of the installation – a stylish metal plate with the title of the work engraved on white banana boxes, offers a possible ironic association with a certain elitist, civilised, civil order to which one aspires to belonging, and which has been brought to a state of complete absurdity and degradation by social and historical trends. In this discourse of interpretation of social circumstances and collective tendencies towards the establishment of supreme ideological values and ethical responsibilities, modalities of perception of Radovanović's work offer codes of the construction of social reality, broken down in order to disorganise or reorganise it. It is not an object of contemplation, but a proclamation and a call; it communicates, documents, engages emotionally and intellectually, and in this sense is undoubtedly defined as an authentically engaged expression of contemporary artistic practice.
Milica Bezmarević