SANJA NEŠKOVIĆ PERŠIN: THE MOMENT BEFORE

Following the traces of her earlier works, artist Sanja Nešković Peršin ventures into the most mysterious regions of artistic creation. Using performative film and live performance, she imaginatively creates a sensual cacophony, exploring in this realm the longing and trauma that inevitably accompany the deeply rooted pursuit of excellence. By juxtaposing vague, indecipherable black-and-white images of individual movements discarded in the past for their lack of perfection with her performative intervention in the space, the artist establishes an internal dialogue from the perspective of an uncertain present, reproducing a feeling of suspense that precedes the actual resolution of expectation. This dynamic interplay of image and sound fragments in the darkness of the exhibition space draws a map of tension and uncertainty that, from today’s perspective, encourages an exploration of the constellation of what could have been and what did not happen.

Using a unique poetic language dominated by a steady cadence of increasingly intense movement variations, which she has practised continuously throughout her dance career, the artist seeks to transcend the boundaries of the physical, emphasising the importance and weight of the irrational as an essential part of our rational perception. Through the iconoclastic exercise of deconstructing repetitive movements, she reveals the uncanny complexity of conflicting emotional impulses that underlie the creative process. Unconscious themes emerge through memories of half-lived, unrealised experiences, creating a dream-like atmosphere in which the artist sublimates the desire for perfection until it combusts.

The artistic intervention The Moment Before is set in the moment before anything happens: even nothing. It is a plunge into the void, a second of complete uncertainty, the moment when you dare to step onto the stage. It is a state of rapture that allows us to travel through time with imagination. A place from which we can consciously access the detailed fragments of our own experiences that our past often jealously guards in the unconscious, to find a balance in which we can accept in our fragility that what meant failure for us at a particular time is an inalienable part of our present. Perhaps it is precisely this moment that brings us closest to what we have always aspired to.