LIEBE UND TOD IM GARTEN DER GÖTTER

 Dejan Dukic & Evy Jokhova 
June 5 – August 10, 2024 

Amore e morte nel giardino degli dei is an Italian feature film from 1972, directed by Sauro Scavolini and based on an idea by Anna Maria Gelli. In the film, an ornithologist rents a remote mansion in a large, park-like garden in the Italian region of Umbria to pursue his studies undisturbed. During a walk, he finds some tapes in the undergrowth: they contain recordings of a woman’s psychoanalytical sessions. Her name is Azzurra. She talks about her relationship with her alleged brother Manfredi: a bond that has been characterized by an ambiguous and obsessive love-hate relationship since they were children. Through his listening, the researcher unexpectedly becomes a witness to a drama that shifts more and more from the recorded reality of the audio footage into his own, in other words: into the present of the film plot, leading to the death of almost everyone involved. 

The German title of this almost forgotten film, which added an equally poetic, existentialist and mysterious perspective to the ‘thriller’ genre that was particularly prominent in the 1970s, is also the name of the exhibition by Dejan Dukic and Evy Jokhova: Liebe und Tod im Garten der Götter (Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods).

If one takes a closer look at Jokhova’s plant sculptures and Dukic’s paintings in reference to the title of the exhibition, some illuminating parallels to film emerge: Just as time is compressed in the layers of the audio tapes in Scavolini’s work, thus interweaving the cinematic past with the present of the plot, the paint in Dukic’s works is also pressed through the structure of the canvas. His works show pictorial spaces – sometimes in a pattern-like manner – that have been fused with beads of colour. Masses of paint are unmodelled and freely visible as a diffuse quantity of material traces. In this way, paint becomes visible as an agentic network of pigment and binder, which normally remains hidden beneath the surface of what is depicted, beneath brushstrokes and aspects of meaning, and thus actually remains invisible as a mere material of representation. 

The audio fragments present in Scavolinis film also allow the viewer to visualise what the ornithologist can only imagine – the underbelly of past actions, whose drastic nature unfolds only in retrospect: the story of Azzurra and Manfredi, which can be regarded as the internal plot of the mysterious thriller. Dukic’s attention is also focussed on the reverse side of things, which he turns outwards, as well as on the metaphysical process of deceleration inherent in painting. Through his working principle of pressing the paint through the fabric and allowing it to unfold, the artist makes the production of a painting the subject of his examination in his work – the flowing, balling and clumping of paint becomes aesthetically visible, even tangible, thus enabling the colour to display its own laws, through the artist. 

Similar to the audio tapes found among the thickets of the Umbrian forest, Dukic’s bodies of color also hang among plant objects. Evy Jokhova’s clay sculptures combined with organic material form this extremely current version of a divine garden. They are influenced by the artist’s direct experience of rituals and practices, which she learnt from her encounters with indigenous people from the Amazon rainforest in Peru, specifically the Shipibo-Conibo. Communities such as these are characterised not only by diverse skills in arts and crafts, but also by extensive ethnobotanical knowledge embedded in their own pluralistic cosmologies – for example in combination with making contact with ancestors and spirits, and through totemic rituals; but also in connection with healing methods involving psycho-reactive plants.

In Jokhova’s stoneware objects, there are references to natural magic on the one hand and to the double temporality of Scavolini’s film on the other – the preserved memory on the tapes and the present of the filmic action, which is changed by the past captured on the tapes. The artist also moulds originally indigenous ideas about the understanding of nature and the ceremonial knowledge of ideal ancestors and spiritual instances in her botanical objects, drawing supra-temporal references to inherited knowledge about the environment and its conditionality. She places this conditionality at the centre of questions about plural coexistence. These questions ask how nature can reconnect what capitalism and extraction have separated – namely the relationships to corporeality and collective consciousness. 

Comparable to the interweaving of the levels of action and time in Amore e morte nel giardino degli dei, the joint exhibition by Dejan Dukic and Evy Jokhova – Liebe und Tod im Garten der Götter – can also be understood as a reflection on how individual experience is mirrored in artistic material, even how this material gains the upper hand. The exhibition can also be understood as an offer of a collective experience, just like a film. Similar to the intertwined narratives of Scavolini’s film, Dukic’s blooming and organic thickenings of paint are becoming buds between Jokhova’s plant objects, whose collage-like material hybrids bring the spiritual cultural history of the south metaphorically to a garden in Umbria.

Michael Klipphahn-Karge