Lana Mesić (b. 1987, Croatia) works and lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. After her graduation from the Bachelor of Photography at the AKV| St. Joost in Breda in 2010, she earned her Master’s Degree at the same institute in 2012. She is represented by LhGWR Gallery in The Hague.
Her photo works and installations have been exhibited in Het Nutshuis in The Hague, AMC Gallery in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo Photography Bienalle, Dong Gang Photography Festival in South Korea, Organ Vida Festival in Zagreb, and the Nichido Arts Centre in Tokyo, to name a few. She has been nominated for various prizes and residencies, the latest one being the Unseen Grolsch residency, which took place in London last year.
Towers
Towers is a collection of illusions about a specific human delusion.
There is no space to fail in this day and age. The unproductive human is an undesirable human. “Towers” is no more than that. It is claiming the right to spend time on a useless obsession. It will not cure cancer and it will not feed the world. It will not even stand the test of time. The towers will collapse and all that I have left to show for them is a record that once for a brief period they stood tall like totem poles to a time spent refusing to chase the proverbial hamster wheel.
Without wanting to be presumptuous this project echoed a deep-rooted issue we are facing in our society. Namely, I wondered how does our capitalist system really affect us. We all know about it, but its actual effects are abstract and always “somewhere else”. I wanted to immerse myself in this structure and really understand its effects on me. The only way to figure this out was to turn its abstraction into physicality. Something I could literally feel on my skin.
This project aims to structurally look at the cornerstones of this system and test them. How does it feel to immerse oneself in something useless, such as building a card-tower that will ultimately collapse? What does a community tradition of building human towers reflect on the core values of a community? How do we look upon money as a value transference system? And ultimately how does it all affect our environment and natural resources?
Ultimately each tower was a way to learn how to learn to let it all go. They collapsed, dissolved, dismantled and burned, and to me this was beautiful.
To view more of Lana Mesic’s work please visit her website.