Imaginary Library. Sculptures and Installations by Gordana Kaljalović Odanović

The work of Gordana Kaljalović Odanović represents an important and indispensable part of Serbian fine arts, which emerged and lasted over a wide and very dynamic time span, from the last decade of the 20th century to the present day. She is a witness and participant in those artistic aspirations and practices that will overcome the traditional understanding of sculpture. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1975 (sculpture major) and from the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade in 1977 (English Language and Literature group). She received her master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Since 1993, she has been teaching at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. She worked as a full professor at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad from 2006-2016.

Gordana has built her reputation on sophisticated, lyrical compositions and a characteristic artistic-poetic process of contrasting relationships between materials and energy: wood, stone, ceramics versus glass, tracing paper, paper, light. Through a three-dimensional structure, the artist thus visualizes and emphasizes a network of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and messages. These are new, hybrid forms, both in the material and conceptual sense, that connect different fragments of the material, tangible, and symbolic, imaginary worlds. Gordana’s sculptures, objects, and installations lead us from one reality to another, expressing a sensitive, feminine ambivalence between opposing fields: media novelty and classical, almost perfect manuality.

One of her major themes, which she has been researching and visually structuring for a decade or more, is the phenomenon of the book. Through its form, the book is subjected to various forms of examination, commentary, and criticism, from the smallest unit – the letter – to the book as a “field of power”. Her sculptures – books thus become critically positioned in relation to certain social, political, and cultural phenomena and/or specific literary works. Context is an integral part of the artistic work, which also determines the plastic-visual form of her work – from a scroll, a book as a landscape (Travel Diary) to a book with nails (Balkan Expression), a wounded book in bandages, to the Sound Book (in which the artist reads the poem “I am looking for a word” by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska) and installations such as Archaeology of Memory, as a simulation and interpretation of the library burned in the fire of April 6th, 1941.

The artist follows the view that there is nothing outside the text, and that words, language, and books seek spatialization. The range of forms through which thought is articulated determines her visual representation, often situated through a non-sculptural language, yet with a completely clear and pure aesthetic. The very books, texts and words of Paul Valéry, Jovan Dučić, Orhan Pamuk, George Orwell are transformed into a sculptural sign, whose semiology brings new meanings and manifestations. Her “Imaginary Library” therefore represents “an analysis of impressions, memories, imagination, recollection, the entire fund that makes up the mechanism of the image in time”.