Balkan Tango With New Idea Woman

“When I started exploring the profession, I had no idea what to do. /.../ How to present myself? When asked, how to make life more interesting, an old professor answered: Fall in love with a beautiful woman or with a major problem! I fell in love with Pretty Woman. I spent 35 years DANCING TANGO with her. Love, passion, boredom, memories, nostalgia, jealousy... BALKAN TANGO.”
Dragan Sakan

NEW RENAISSANCE
Renaissance ideal - homo universalis (lat. "universal man" or "man of the world") - used to describe a person who is well educated or who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields.
What is much more common today than the universal approach to knowledge from a single polymath, is the multidisciplinary approach to knowledge which derives from several experts from different fields

IDEAS
The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings. Everybody has the ideas – children have ideas too. But not all ideas could be considered as interesting, breaking or creative. And only small number could be considered as and idea product – art work or a patent for example.
That’s why the idea based on inspiration is seen as common part of every creative product expressed and realized in different media.
The one that considers generation of new ideas, or new associations of existing ideas or concepts is creativity. Creativity has been attributed variously - to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, chance or even to the genius. But it is always depending on inspiration. (in spirit)

NEW IDEA WOMAN
New Idea Woman represents photos of women who are representatives of creativity in different media. Those women are seen as personification of the profession they represent: art, science, film, design, music, literature, IT, communication, theatre … As a certain kind of Muses (Greek mythology goddesses or spirits who inspired the creation process, connected with different parts of human creativity at the time).
The photos are composed on the basis of the renaissance way of representation. They involve the beauty and symbolic, concept, message and excellence in execution.
The common symbol which shows in each photo is the light bulb representing the IDEA, which is always treated differently in order to fit the meaning of the message represented.
In terms of formal and conceptual level, the image is designed and shaped in order to explain the idea process which brings to creative product of the profession which is represented at the photo. The women – models are actual professionals with the high level of recognition in the fields they represent. They look beautiful and motivating to the spectator while they are focused on the creative process.

WOMAN
The new renaissance concept of New Idea Woman (confronting renaissance concept of Renaissance men) brings us to the next level of the project and projects objective: position of the woman in contemporary society. No matter how the women had achieved their rights, the sexism still persisted in many areas of society. The equal representation of men and women had still not been achieved, particularly at levels of seniority in certain professions.
An old New Yorker cartoon depicts a group of prehistoric women painting images on the wall of a cave. One of the women suddenly pauses in her work and asks: “Does it strike anyone as weird that none of the great painters have ever been men?” (Heller, 1987) This, of course is a parody of the long-held assumption that all prehistoric art was created by men.
Going trough the history of education and culture we cannot find a lot of women figures attached to important achievements. The small numbers of examples are usually connected with prodigal or even deviant behavior. Reviewing the works of early Greek philosophers which was the base for the development of the modern civilization, one finds that they had very weary views of women. Aristotle, for example, argued that women were not full human beings and that the nature of women was not that of a full person.
For many hundreds of years, women struggled to gain recognition, and for the greater number of these years, they remained obscured due to the constraints of patriarchal society. In the feminist movement of the seventies, women have found a voice and a face and recognition.
Women today are finding that they have yet another battle to fight, one that demands that they be looked at as more than merely women creators in the light of feminism. Society is failing to see that what creates a woman’s identity encompasses far more than simply her gender. Women will always be valuable contributors and they need to be honored for what they bring to the world due to their individual experiences, personality and creative achievement.

Opening, Friday 10 December 2010 at 8 pm
The exhibition will be on view until 25. January 2011
Kindly welcome! Admission free.

Partner: New Moment

Opening: Friday 10 December at 8 pm
MMC KIBLA Maribor

KiBela is open every day 9.00 am to 10.00 pm, Saturdays 4.00 pm to 10.00 pm, and closed Sundays.

KiBela programme is supported by
Slovenian Ministry of Culture
EACEA, Brussels
Municipality of Maribor