Garaža Kamba

In the interstellar crevices of undefined future days, two people, one with a metaphorical pickaxe, writes to another, of unknown occupation: “If they knew what we are today, what we have become, they would not have left us random objects that have confused us for centuries. (…) What’s your opinion?
How’s your family?“. Almost voyeuristically, the observer enters into a conversation between two friends about the fragments found broken by the loss of digital data transmission. One of the friends, an archaeologist, is excited but also frustrated about his findings, a series of skulls of the genus Homo, dusty archaeological finds that testify to the mother planet of the human race.
Skulls in spheres are seeds, witnesses to the truth, and, in a way, the last twitches of the old human race launched according to the artist’s template, by the human hand into the wasteland of the cosmos in an effort to snatch their messages from the ravages of time. In the setting of the ambient installation The Song of the Century, a meeting of literary form and painting takes place, in which Ivan Oštarčević does not set either as primary, but interweaves them into a narrative about the human race, its undefined (and perhaps non-existent) fall and development, friendship and visions of the future.
The artist dislocates us to another locality where all the turmoil, knowledge, and mistakes of the human race become only fragments from which the message is read, supplemented by the lyrics of 21st Century Breakdown album and correspondence in which terms appear in the play of language forms, grammatical errors, and jargon. His work intertwines disguised politics, which is seen in the joining of criticism of the human condition in the 21st century, with the hope of transformation. There is something here about the way we can observe our own history and present state, the impossibility of perceiving the whole picture, and the ways in which we fill the gaps in knowledge with assumptions, at a time when we seem to already be leaving our home planet behind.

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