new exhibition
space 10ka, GMK, Šubićeva 29
opening: Thursday, November 20, 2025, 7:00 PM
duration: until December 4, 2025
gallery opening hours > Tue-Fri: 4-7 PM / Sat: 10 AM-1 PM
free admission
foreword
In the darkened gallery, the light flickers as if trying to summon a projection that will never take place. There is no projector. No film, at least not the kind we expect. What remains is only its residue: a rhythm of disappearance, an alternation of light and shadow compressed into a single frame. A moment breathing between appearance and vanishing, like the pause in the breath of a machine that stopped working long ago, yet whose pulse can still be felt beneath the fingertips. Isidora Todorić returns film to its primordial, pre-technological state: she strips it to what always belonged to it. To the pulse oscillating between the visible and its loss, as if the image were still trying to happen. This pulse reaches beyond optics. It sets the stage for what the work ultimately engages with: not the image itself, but the characters who have disappeared from it, the protagonists of the Western film canon of the 20th century, where narrative roles were rigorously assigned according to gender. Men were given rebellion; women were given punishment, or erasure. Broadly speaking. The work begins as an experiment with the frame, but reveals itself almost immediately as an experiment with narrative.
Through this installation, the gallery becomes a cinema without apparatus, a space of Deleuze’s “time-image.” A scene stripped of narrative and characters; a frame that does not need motion in order to exist. Instead of a film beam, the space is occasionally cut by a flash—brief, sharp, a pulse of light that offers no projection but confirms that the act of looking persists. The flash is not an image but a reminder of the possibility of one. A moment that ignites only to disappear. In this dynamic, Barthes’s ça a été, the claim that every image testifies to something that has already happened, loses its ground. The light here does not attest to the past; it attests to a duration that continuously renews itself. At the center of the work is not the light but the raster: the digital pattern of light and dark squares that software uses to mark absence. Isidora materializes it, turning it into surface. This “checkerboard of transparency” becomes a texture of presence, a gathering place for everything the digital system would otherwise delete. The gallery floor functions as an anti-screen, a space that stores rather than displays. The raster ceases to be an ornament and becomes the conceptual skeleton of the work, a scene stripped to its foundation, a layer where looking moves from representation to experience. Emptiness gains weight; the raster gains a body; the invisible gains skin.
The visitor does not occupy the position of an audience member. They become an optical body, something between an eye and a camera, a subject that edits their own perception. Each flash operates like a cut; each moment of darkness, like the interval between frames, the thin threshold separating the motionless from the living. In this shift of film into a state of presence, the artist opens space for something that appears in her practice for the first time as a political gesture: a feminist inscription of what cinema has erased for decades. The cinematic standard of 25 frames per second, the minimum required to produce the illusion of movement (animation can function with fewer), gains new meaning in shes_so_al_pacino.png. It becomes a measure of perception. The ratio of 1/25 light and 24/25 darkness is no longer a technical standard but a tempo of being. In this ratio, film frees itself from the apparatus and becomes an apparatus of attention.
This work also opens a new direction in Isidora’s practice. While earlier pieces explored mythological, ritual, or linguistic structures, here the focus turns toward the history of looking itself. The point of departure is Western cinematography, an imaginary that has, for generations, inscribed itself into our collective gaze, shaping our tacit ideals and our assumptions about who may or may not be a hero. This installation does not reject that tradition; it dissolves it. The raster covering the space becomes a metaphorical ground for erasing the image’s authority. In digital language, it signals “there is nothing here,” while in Isidora’s interpretation it marks the point from which protagonists have been removed, literally. From this place of disappearance emerges the work’s second layer: a shift away from the image as aesthetic object, toward the characters who have been erased from it. Particularly those positioned, within classical Western narratives, at the boundary of law, ethics, and social order. Westerns, noir, and classical Hollywood dramaturgy consistently produce figures of transgression, yet their fates are almost always predetermined. The outlaw typically ends up dead or morally rehabilitated through marriage, fatherhood, or reintegration into the community.
Crucially, this dynamic is reserved for male characters; women are rarely granted the possibility of rebellion, and even less frequently its survival. Isidora addresses precisely this void, this lack of space for a female body that could act outside predetermined ethical boundaries. The installation does not seek to invent replacements for these figures. It creates a space in which their instability, their non-existence, can be felt. Erasure becomes an act of resistance: a dismantling of the frame’s hierarchy and the narrative’s authority. What feminist film theorists analyze in theory, Todorić translates into physical experience: the visitor walks alongside the raster of an erased screen. Unlike her earlier works rooted in mythological language, here she opens a post-cinematic space, a space after the apparatus.
She subtly engages in dialogue with the poetics of Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Marguerite Duras, where the camera is no longer a distant instrument but a body listening to space. She echoes Didi-Huberman’s notion of light that “remembers what it illuminated.” Yet her gesture moves one step further: she creates an image that exists after the frame, in a time when looking is no longer an act of the eye but an algorithm. In shes_so_al_pacino.png, this loss also becomes a space of mourning. The transparent raster functions as ground for the characters that film never allowed, not as their bodies, but as the possibilities systematically erased. Their presence is not depiction but remainder; evidence that they belonged to narratives that left them no frame. And although contemporary cinema is gradually changing, this historical surplus of absence remains. The exhibition thus unfolds as a feminist requiem: a commemoration of roles that could have existed but were not permitted to, and a reminder of what contemporary gazes are only now beginning to restore.
In discussing the work, Isidora highlighted three concepts that structure her practice: informed chaos, multiplicity of selves, and armed innocence. These are not metaphors but precise coordinates of her artistic method. She treats girlhood not as nostalgia but as a particular mode of perception, a gaze born from a marginal, unprotected position, a place that sees what others overlook. “Girlhood is picking up snails from the middle of the road,” she said, almost casually, but that sentence reveals her method: rescuing what would otherwise remain unnoticed, returning attention to the trivial, opening space for motifs not considered worthy of sight.
shes_so_al_pacino.png thus becomes an act of raising an invisible image. Instead of Barthes’s “this has been,” Isidora’s work says: “this is being erased.” Here, erasure is not treated as loss but as tenderness, a permission for the image to detach, like a strip of film that once could ignite under the projector’s light. In the thin space between frame and darkness, between memory and render, between the gaze and its extinguishing, Isidora’s world emerges. In it, as she says, “animals, words, plants and images are friends, not means.”
In a visual culture that produces images faster than it allows them to become experience, Isidora returns the image to its preliminary, fragile state: to the moment in which it is only beginning to become visible. She is not concerned with digital aesthetics but with their origin. She turns the raster into a material rhythm, a weave that shelters what would otherwise vanish, especially the figures historically pushed to the frame’s margins, and transforms it into a surface where these absent characters gather and learn to exist. This is where the poetics of Isidora Todorić’s work resides: tenderness as a strategy for the survival of the image; attention as the quietest form of resistance. This exhibition is not about light, but about everything that light never illuminated, about presences historically left outside the frame, about characters who never existed. The occasional flashes are not the subject but the signal: proof that the gaze still persists, trembling like the voice of an erased protagonist, one who never received a frame, but who inscribes one here for herself.
The title shes_so_al_pacino.png operates as a kind of coded manifesto. It resonates with the entire spectrum of female identifications that for decades had to pass through male characters, actors, heroes, outlaw figures. The title is at once irony and admission, a name that doesn’t belong, but must be written into the file format in order to appear at all. In that “.png” extension, and in the transparent, cut-out, unfinished format of the installation, Isidora creates a safe place where the protagonist denied a frame can finally inscribe her own presence, as a tender vibration that refuses to disappear.
Tea Matanović
About the Artist
Isidora Todorić is a visual artist working in the fields of sculpture, new media practices, and experimental approaches. She graduated in New Media and later completed her MA in Sculpture and Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in Ljubljana. Her work has been presented at Galerija Ravne, the showroom of Galerija Nova in Zagreb, P74 Gallery, and numerous group exhibitions across Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, including DobraVaga, the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, MGBS, the Slovenian Museum of Natural History, and the Svetlobna Gverila Festival.
Impressum
Artist: Isidora Todorić
Exhibition Title: shes_so_al_pacino.png
Visual Identity Design: Jasna Laura Zabel
Duration: 20.11 – 04.12.2025
Location: Galerija Miroslav Kraljević (GMK), Šubićeva 29, Zagreb
Foreword: Tea Matanović Gallery Directors: Antonela Solenički, Tea Matanović Production: Generator multidisciplinarnih koprodukcija (GMK) Supported by: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb Gallery supported by: Kultura nova Foundation, INA d.d.
