JAŠA: REKVIEM

Tartini House, Piran June 22, 2024 – September 7, 2024

The project was awarded to the artist as part of the special 2023 Tartini Award at the 58th Ex-tempore Piran, presented by the Giuseppe Tartini Italian Community.

Rekviem was an interdisciplinary work that transcended traditional art forms. By fusing visual arts, performance, architectural interventions, puppet art, poetry, and music, JAŠA created a new comprehensive entity that blurred the lines between reality and constructed space. This approach engaged all senses, allowing the viewers to immerse themselves fully in the experience.

Requiem generally refers to a musical composition for those who are no longer with us, a final tribute to the deceased. JAŠA’s Rekviem held a special dedication to his late father, the esteemed psychiatrist Gorazd V. Mrevlje, who recently passed away. In this tribute, his father was one of the three protagonists represented by marionettes. These marionettes were crafted by the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre according to the author’s design and in collaboration with artist Meta Grgurevič. The marionettes—Father, Author, and Giuseppe Tartini, the renowned 18th-century violinist and composer—inhabited a parallel, extra-temporal reality, with which JAŠA challenged the notion of an ending.

The exhibition setup encompassed most of the museum rooms at the Tartini House. JAŠA utilised these spaces, incorporating them as ready-made objects alongside selected existing exhibit items. Combined with visual, sound, musical, and situational interventions, these spaces were transformed into living pictures. They served both as complete units and as fragments of a story that wove through the entire architecture of the house.

Curatorial Note (Laura Rositani):

Casa Tartini became a gathering of parallels, as JAŠA defined it, a bouleversement of situations, figures, and sounds. It was the architecture of a dream, which shifted and changed continuously. The house itself, its rooms overturned and moved as in a magnificent Piranesi architecture. It was a dreamlike work, a precious window into the most hidden desires and conflicts.

Three was the recurring number: three were the characters and the third was the dimension of Tartini’s sound, almost imperceptible but the result of a perfect harmony: the interference effect between two sounds which, if perfectly in tune, generated a third barely perceptible one. Two fragments could give life to a whole, a third dimension. JAŠA acted as the conductor of this piece that came to life and intertwined with the figures of his father and the famous violinist. And in doing so, he traced a circle, a set of parallel narratives that seemingly never met. He gave the audience a new score, a script rewritten according to an eternal movement.