The work presented by Maja Rožman is an artistic process of performative kind, primarily evaluating the element of giving in a simple way – by making coffee after the recipes from the exhibition catalogue.
Maja Rožman is concerned with giving as artistic gesture, but within the process of associating with others. She does not only prepare the action of making coffee before the public, but she prepares it for the public, or, more precisely, for each individual visitor at the exhibition. The author exposes the mingling at exhibition openings as the main content of our presence there, which enables the visitors to experience the work of art in a more sincere and complete way, where the sincerity of a work of art equals the sincerity of our visit to the exhibition.
Sincerity, which is one of the main presuppositions of this work, leads to truth. According to the classical theory of truth, it is a property of assertive statement. The truth is a correspondence between notions and things. In this case, the author applies it to the exhibition concept and the work realisation.
Maja Rožman’s invitation for coffee is not only a form of socialisation in which the author ironically comments on gathering at exhibitions emerging from our need for company. If we look at Maja Rožman’s earlier works, in which the young artist takes photographs of people, treating them like artefacts in an archive, we learn that the author is not primarily interested in criticising that social custom, but rather in discovering the personality and the specificity of an individual or in attributing personal characteristics to objects through their owners who exchange them.
After the performance of making coffee to the recipes from the catalogue, where Maja Rožman fulfils the guests’ wishes at the opening of the exhibition, during the days after the opening, the author will exhibit cups of coffee they drank as a trace of the process of consuming the work and the social imprint remaining after the opening. Although here we have remnants of a social event, traces – lipstick, coffee dregs, spilt or left over coffee – they point at the personalised object and the person belonging to it.
At the opening of the exhibition the author will put on a special robe resembling a working suit or workwear which opens new connotations. The robe is a link with historical and cultural studies of the phenomenon of drinking coffee, by which the author refers to the space and time when Turkish coffee was served in public facilities.
The ritual of making coffee and giving away partly emerges from the author’s family situation. Her mother makes coffee every day, although she does not drink it. Through the coffee making ritual, the author questions the traditional woman’s role, but the presence of the author’s mother at the exhibition, partaking at the performance, is an important source of understanding and support, not only in the mother – child relationship, but also as a backup to artistic work and to the effort of contemporary artists who wish their actions to be accepted. “How can I explain to my mother that this which I am doing serves a purpose?” – the question asked by Italian contemporary Oreste artists (this is a paraphrase of the well-known Beuys’s work in which he tries to “explain art to a dead rabbit”), finds its answer in conceptual work, which tries to be understandable and easily acceptable.
In that way the author opens a question of vanishing cultural and traditional customs like consuming Turkish coffee, which disappear from typical (public) places and become restricted to the private sphere, in our country to the family circle. The process of political reforms in the first half of the twentieth century in Turkey pushed the custom of drinking Turkish coffee out of the public cultural conscience.” However, how it still survived, we can read in the recipe booklet / catalogue of the exhibition listing specific ways of making coffee. The not so abrupt and visible disappearance of Turkish coffee happened in the whole public space of the former Turkish Empire, including our (public) facilities. Eradicated by political and economical reasons, this custom remains present in the privacy of our homes.
Long preparation, serving and even longer drinking was replaced – partly for the reason of time economy – by espresso and instant coffee, which are quickly ready, but not equally quickly consumed. Espresso is the coffee of the business world, which implies quick preparation and approximately the same drinking length, while the drinking length of instant coffee is not determined, extending if we drink it alone or in the company of a computer.
We link the notions of concentration and devotion as well as the social element to Turkish coffee and the time it requires. This is not so discernible in modern coffee varieties, based on factual caffeine content.
However, generalisation of social phenomena is secondary also in the analysis of this work, which turns the human mass into individuals through specific actions of the author, by fulfilling the guest’s wishes through a culturally diversified coffee menu.
Davorka Perić Vučić šneperger
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Maja Rožman was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1981. After finishing the School of Applied Arts and Design, she enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Currently she is a graduate student at the Graphics and New media Department. She lives and works in Zagreb.
Contact
beemya@yahoo.com
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Sponsor of the exhibition: Anamarija Company
