mixed-media exhibition / Gallery of Students’ City Cultural Center, Belgrade, Serbia / 2023

The exhibition Aiming at Me? – Between Virtual Image and Reflected Thought investigates the relationship between the mirror and technical images and features the three-channel video installation 3x3x3 on three TV screens, a photograph, the video projection Omnipotence of the Gaze, a wall mural, and a small round mirror presented as a wall installation. The works presented address topics such as reflection, (auto-)reflexivity, projection, counter-gaze, mechanical gaze, subjectivity and intersubjectivity within close family relationships.

In the work 3x3x3, the geometrical and physical principles of reflection are subjected to a creative experiment with an ordinary glass mirror, from which the reflective layer of silver has been partially removed by scratching and peeling. In this process, the original object ceases to be only a catoptric means for creating a reflection (in geometrical optics, the term virtual image is used instead of reflection) and is transformed into a harmed mirror with gaps and holes in the reflection.

This harmed mirror, through the synchronous action of the optical phenomena of reflection and transmission of light, enables the creation of an ephemeral, layered image in which the reflection of the subject standing in front of the mirror overlaps with the staging of the subject standing behind the mirror.

Since the described process presents neither a digitally generated composite image nor analogue effects obtained by “mechanical” or “artificial” merging of images, the term living synthetic image was created to characterize the specific visual scenery produced by the harmed mirror, which really exists in reality at a given moment, caused solely by the synergy of reflection and gaps in that same reflection.