Ibro Hasanović
Spectre
HD video, 7’ 30’’, 2012
Video stills courtesy of the artist
Director: Ibro Hasanović
Image: Srđan Kovačević
Editing: Pauline Piris-Nury
Producer: Ibro Hasanović
Production coordinator: Nemanja Cvijanović
Production assistant: Romano Perić
Produced in collaboration with The SIZ Gallery and the Kamov Residency Programme, Rijeka
Supported by: The City of Rijeka - Department of Culture, Primorsko-goranska County, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Spectre is a meditation on decay and death, on the ways memory haunts and affects the present. The film was shot on the Yugoslav Navy Yacht Galeb, which Josip Broz Tito used for parties, foreign visits and diplomacy. Once a glamorous symbol of Yugoslav history, the yacht now sits abandoned in a shipyard.
In her text “Impossible Encounters”, Branka Benčić writes about the video:
“Ships are places of interesting histories, both known and unknown, visible and invisible, and of mysterious auras. The ‘ghosts’ of Galeb, as specters of the system, occupy the vacant social and ideological place as their referential field, while glimpses are shown of the true destiny of the ship, which is to become a commodified tourist attraction.
Optically unconscious, the camera moves through ‘interior landscapes’, the deserted, empty remains of a glorious history, progress, journeys, representations of modernism, enclosed spaces, spaces of fiction; evoking the tradition and concept of the cabinet of miracles as remnants of the ‘theatre of memory’, exploring and reflecting different positions and manners of structuring the meaning of space, which displace and transform the common understanding, evoking different feelings, insecurities, disorientations, transience. It is as if the film slides through the representation of genres, the cinematography of the 20th century, representing the joining of culture and cinematographic structure. The psychological and symbolic qualities of its architecture, just like the interrelations of the constructed ambience, material, real and artificial space, become places for creating meaning.”
