DDR FRAU (Wireless Calls)
Ljubljana
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In the period of the present historical corrective which, at least as it is seen from the outside, evolves through the presence of women in the media as part of the social and political discourse, the series of paintings entitled DDR Frau – Wireless Calls also includes the »question of women«. But Ana Sluga uses it to reconsider her personal history, and by representing the female protagonist, surrounded by references to the artist’s reminiscences of her family’s past, she expresses it more directly than she ever did before.
The intimacy in her paintings is never uncovered but rather concealed, presented without sentimentality, narrative eloquence, or artistic expressiveness; however, it is always the generative basis for her thematic choices and the background onto which potential social, political, and ideological contents is projected.
The pictures, in this case centred on the human figure, are removed from her previous works while at the same time, by treating the individual, the particular, and that which is her own, the artist accepts them as an inevitable part and reflection on the social and cultural context, thus inviting them into the wider conceptual frame of her practice.
The series entitled DDR Frau (Wireless Calls), among other things, reflects the fact that the artist’s father’s name was Schneider, which pinpoints the real and symbolic source of her identity. The pictures in the series Wireless calls are not simply reminiscences of the broken ties with the past but rather the calls of something real which, according to Lacan, function outside of and independently of one’s idea of it, while the truth itself is structured according to the same principles as fiction, through the dimension of the symbolic.
Nadja Gnamuš, PhD
Excerpt from the text: on the DDR painting cycle DDR Frau-Wireless Calls
