Shadows.One Yet Separate (Sjene. Jedno ali odvojeno)

The Museum Lapidarium , Novigrad, Croatia
Curated by Jerica Ziheri

Shadows. One Yet Separate refers to the prose poem “Sjena (Shadow)” by Croatian poet A. G. Matoš, addressing lingual politics and the need for post-language poetry within a hypothetical time and society. The exhibition features new drawings, videos, and light installations.
The Croatian scripts from Matoš’s handwritten poetry are deconstructed and overwritten, transforming into visual forms as asemic scripts. These scripts lack specific semantic content or recognizable language structure, presenting visually intriguing glyphs and marks that resemble writing without conforming to linguistic rules. This results in an unauthored, incomprehensible series of new drawings.
The exhibition offers a linguistic reimagination and explores subconscious assumptions of an unfamiliar, ‘unknown’ culture and language. The illegible linguistic artifice is designed to induce a sense of dyslexia and a refusal to access meaning, capturing the angst of location, belonging, and solidarity.
Along with a guided light-line around the museum site, the new light installation interprets an interplay of imaginary words and image associations between visible surfaces and their shadows. It creates an architectonic and poetic form of experimental illuminated visual poetry, guiding the viewer through the space and serving as both luminosity and aesthetic accompaniment.
The exhibition frames language, identity, cultural loss, and global politics as incomprehensible poetry, blending internal states of instinct, feeling, sensation, and poetic abstractions. By reproducing an imaginary script through the deconstruction and overwriting of Matoš’s handwritten poems, Mithu Sen creates a ‘cross-cultural exchange’ that alludes to the limits of human communication.