Exhibition Opening | Ivona Šimunović: To Margarita

Performances

29. July / Tuesday / 21:00h

Church of St. Stephen in Pustijerna

Exhibition Opening | Ivona Šimunović: To Margarita

Author: Ivona Šimunović

Curator: Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

Ivona Šimunović was born in 1979 in Dubrovnik, where she went to the Luka Sorkočević Secondary Art School, with a major in painting design. She took a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, class of Zlatko Kauzlarić Atač. She has been a member of the Croatian Artists’ Association since 2006 and has exhibited at both solo and group exhibitions. To accompany her painting, she also has a career in education. Since 2002 she has been employed as educator-curator at the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, taking part in the devising, organisation and production of the educational programme of the Museum. Since 2022 she has been a member of the Council for Culture of the City of Dubrovnik. Her works are to be found in private and public collections in Croatia and abroad. Ivona Šimunović lives and works in Dubrovnik.

To Margarita

Located in the area of Pustijerna, a part of the city that from the 14^th and 15^th centuries was inhabited by wealthy merchants and patrician families such as the Gundulićes, Ranjinas and Kabogas, the Church of St. Stephen can claim an even older past. The actual name Pustijerna comes from the Latin expression post terra, translated as outside the city, referring to the peninsula located next to the port of Dubrovnik.

St Stephen’s Church is the oldest religious building in Dubrovnik, mention of it being found as early as the 10^th century, while archaeological research has provided evidence of an even earlier Romanesque or pre-Romanesque ecclesiastical construction dated to the end of the 8^th century.[1] The church was abandoned after the Great Quake of 1667 and its remains were reused for various purposes (cemeteries and ossuaries) until the church was finally conserved in its roofless state, an embodiment of the ideas of the English Victorian writer and critic John Ruskin, who powerfully resisted the act of restoration of historical buildings, seeing in it a procedure that wiped out their authenticity and historical value. He advocated for the preservation of such buildings with minimal intervention, allowing their historical patina to be appreciated, along with its traces, signs of decay, and the authenticity of the structure. Although the liturgy is performed in the church on St Stephen’s Day (August 3), the space of the conserved and partially reconstructed church with its bare walls leaves room for environmental complementation inherent to which is a continuation of the very narrative thread of the church’s past.

With work on the cusp of painting and installation, artist Ivona Šimunović enters into a space instinct with the past, from which she does not flee, allowing it instead to be the point of departure for her deliberations upon her artwork. According to legend, it was in this very church that Priest Stojko had a vision of St Blaise, who warned him of the danger of an attack by the Venetians, after which he was recognised as the patron saint of the city.

Another legend has it that it was Croatian king Stjepan Miroslav and his queen Margarita who in 948 had this Old Croatian royal church constructed. In this exhibition, the artist addresses precisely her, Croatian queen Margarita, who with her husband gave important reliquaries to the first small Church of St Stephen, over which she later built a church, the locality of which is still today concealed from the view and the everyday bustle of the city. After her husband’s death, in her grief, she settled down in Dubrovnik, becoming a nun and living in a dwelling by the church itself, in which she was subsequently buried. The actual title of the exhibition reflects the concept of what is known as visual writing, in which the artist addresses Margarita as woman. Šimunović cleaves to the motif of the circle, a leitmotif of this artist, who repeats in every series of works, practically mantra-like, the shape of circle or semicircle. On the colour-neutral historical backdrop of the church, Šimunović boldly places an installation comprising five large paintings in the altar space, the central liturgical space and sign of the divine presence and sacrifice. The deployment and size of the paintings in which the central image is symmetrically bordered by two pictures at the same distance from each side enhances the monumental feeling and the marked verticality that takes us back to a primordial and totemic sphere.

The circle motif is a powerful symbolic presence in the Šimunović oeuvre; here, in the space of the church, it takes on an additionally spiritual dimension. In Christianity, the circle, qua geometrical form without beginning or end, signifies infinity or eternity, and the very representation of the God with whom these properties are associated. Rendered in the architectural motif of rosette, in the shape of the communion wafer, the visual motif of halo, a luminous circle, it signifies the presence of the divine and the transcendent. However, in Šimunović's work, this circle is unfinished in terms of geometry and to the naked eye, calling upon the observer to enter the spiritual and transcendental sphere that will complete the shape of the circle as a whole. On the canvases in which she mixes fabric, paper and paint, the author inscribes only a semicircle, created with deliberate irregularity in an act of the imperfect human hand. The imperfection and rawness are rendered also in the very texture of the painting, emphasised in Informel manner by the use of bold impasto and the process of crumpling and impressing paper and fabric. The surface of the painting is thus a proving ground for the numerous grooves and folds that evoke the impression of the texture of old and wrinkled skin into which is inscribed the sense of life lived to the full.

Additionally illuminated by a meticulously considered lighting, the canvas turns into a living organism and passes from matter into life, from the physical to the metaphysical. Also written into its materiality and lack of perfection is a postulate of faith, of a profound sense of dedication in the space of the altar that marks the entry into a new life via the act of baptism, the joining of two souls via the deed of matrimony and the very departure of the soul. But the imperfection of the material circle leads us to the issue of the relation of the concrete, or made-concrete, form of faith like the visible and palpable symbols of religion (cross, candle) and the abstract in faith, which signifies the thinking and invisible side of the faith. It requires a special concentration on, study of, reflection upon and understanding of theological and philosophical concepts of the faith that go where reason has no access and call upon man to ponder upon and feel things outside the limits of the given material world. The incomplete circle additionally accentuated by colour, in the grooves of which is inscribed the mystery of shadow, represents at one and the same time the material and the immaterial world. The material world in which Margarita lived in her body and with which the artist establishes a dialogue, invoking her sacrifice, her calm and quiet life, her dedication and faithfulness, as well as the immaterial world in which the non-material is appealed to, the intellectually perfect circle in the space above the installation itself, in the space of concrete silence and abstract noise. The symbolism of the circle is deeply rooted in the concept of woman, in terms of culture, myth and religion, for it signifies the cyclical nature of life, embodying fertility as natural cycle and especial maternal protection important for the survival of all kinds of earthly beings. Metaphorically depicted within a circle that with its membrane completely protects and enfolds the object, the figure of woman has for millennia represented nurture, devotion, attachment and an innate sense of care for her progeny as well as for the material and immaterial heritage.

Historically assigned to Margarita as woman and queen is the role of one of the more important female personages, whose contribution to the cultural and spiritual heritage has been insufficiently brought out. The author of this exhibition wishes in her work to brush away the dust, metaphorically and physically, both from her name and from the locality itself, and in this manner refers to the observation and registration of the forgotten historical frequencies in the millennial setting of Pustijerna.

Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

[1] Nikolina Topić, Ivana Radić, Petra Rajić Šikanjić, Mato Ilkić: The Church of St Stephen in Dubrovnik: multi-layered cemetery and the inventory of finds (Dubrovnik: Anali Zavoda za povijesne znanosti HAZU u Dubrovniku, br. 57, 2019.)

Photo (c) Miho Skvrce