Generator of Mental Images

author Ivana Franke
written by Maroje Mrduliaš

 

To reproduce Ivana Franke's works in a written (or any other) medium might seem questionable, even problematic. This particularly relates to her spatial installations created within specific architectural contexts. Why do we even attempt to transpose the poetic lightness of her filigree works into a two-dimensional format? Inevitably so, in the photographs, her works have been reduced to meagre information excluding the multidimensionality of their experience. The direct relationship between the audience and the work is severed, in want for discovering the three-dimensional spatiality and perceptive nuances.

However, Ivana Franke's works do not deal only with the immediate perceptive effects; their intention is not to seduce with their form. The authentic space in which her works take place is not a physical but an internal one – a mental space of the observer – which is clearly established in her works such as Seeing with Eyes Closed. This work elicits quasi-hallucinations in the observer via a strong pulsating light, thus explicitly showing the influence that stimulating the retina has on the way the mind works, that is, on mental space.