#neza knez

[viz-a-visage]

Studio Visit: Neža Knez

Slovenian artist Neža Knez explores the intersection of body, space, and senses. In 2014, she collaborated with a group of blind people in the city of Ljubljana to translate textual graffiti into braille. “Blind people are only given instructional information when they need it,” she explains. “We never think about all the other visual information we consume,” including messages which span from the political and inspirational to the vulgar and mundane. A year later, Knez blindfolded herself and lived in a state of blindness for ten days. During that time, she kept a detailed journal and noted how her interactions with space had shifted. During her commute, for example, her hands found a fire extinguisher on the wall of a hallway she had walked down countless times before, a previously inconspicuous object that became a crucial guiding point for her while she lived in darkness. As part of the project, she made three sculptural portraits—the first by memory, the second by touching the face of a model, and the third using only verbal descriptions of the model. When she asked blind colleagues to touch these portraits, they noted how realistic they felt.

Knez’s other works engage auditory communication, as in her voice portraits of people slowly pronouncing the Slovene alphabet, or in her performative readings of Italian texts—a language that she does not speak—in a public library in Milan. By reading the foreign text aloud, Knez explains that her mispronunciations transform language into mere audio, what she calls “pure voice.”

[lavilleouverte]

Mediterranean landscapes

Group exhibition curated by Giuditta Nelli, Pelagica and Marco Trulli

Ieva Saudargaité, Neza Knez, Giulio Saverio Rossi, Ryts Monet, Chloé Despax

Former Embassy of Yugoslavia, Rruga e Durresit, Tirana (Albania)