Gallery PM/ BACVA  Gallery, House of Croatian Artist,  Zagreb, Croatia,  2006

Text Curator: Ljiljana Stepančič, Director of MGLC, Ljubljana



Aprilija Lužar is an engaged artist. She develops her art language through various media, from video to paintings, drawings to performance, to committed social activity.
She creates activist art, i.e. new public art. She understands art as a part of civil activism, with which she contributes for the sake of an increased visibility, acceptance and understanding of  unprivileged social issues.
The topics she talks about raise awareness among people of the importance of non-violent activities and behavior, as much in the private as in public sphere.

Aprilija Lužar, who has for years been connecting art and social activities, might have been a central figure of the visual art scene today in Slovenia, since socially committed art is in   focus.
Her work would legitimize such contemporary creations and would promote younger generations. However it is not so. Aprilija is not in the centre of interest of the contemporary political art in  Slovenia. She is still there , just where she used to be. An artist on the edge of the art and social scene.
The most probable cause of her marginalisation might be that the themes that Aprilija Lužar starts up are not useable enough for political and institutional action/activities, focused on making claims to social power. It is also possible that these themes are too feminine, personal and experiential.

If we think of the other, institutionally-endorsed, themes of political art, it seems that today in such work there is no space for the personally lived-through, painful and humiliating experiences of women

Women's TAXI is a work that talks exactly about this. It arises from the artist's own humiliating personal experience, of being raped, which, with her public confession, she makes socially visible and aware, and therapeutically heals.

It is an artist's contribution to the elimination of violence and abuse. In last couple of years Aprilija Lužar has used TAXI on several occasions. She has produced it as an installation in different variations. Each version has been autonomous, and each has returned to the same topic, as if to the roots, thoroughly incorporating the body of the artist.  It seems as if the rape, domestic violence, sexism, homophobia, trafficking in women and gender stereotypes, had entirely pervaded her body. Repetition and returning to the same topic also mean that a single alert means nothing. It is not enough, because once is never. With one action we can not get rid of deeply rooted and suppressed problems. And one public confession does not wash away pain from the body.
The art work with TAXI is based on the communication between the artist and the public, between her and social and cultural institutions, and between women and the media.
With this work she fights against violence. She points out that this space depends on the state of awareness and responsibility of each of us. Each of us can do something to reduce violence. With our behaviour and actions we can also relativise powerful ideological machines, such as the media and their virulently sexist and homophobic news and pictures.  
Communication, establishing verbal and other relationships among people is the substance of relation art. Works of such kind evade  physical/ity. They are not embodied/materialized.

Instead of this they are built by exchange of thoughts and information. Artists perform actions or design/create spaces and situations and offer them to the public to be 'used' as a platform.
The public, which is not often the regular art public, but rather random passers-by, can accept this platform and develop it. It can establish dynamic relation with the art works.
The video works of Aprilija Lužar that are represented in Zagreb are kind of postproduction. The material it is comprised of was made in Slovenia from 2003-2005 and in Vienna this year, in the framework of a festival of women's art Her Position in Transition, where Aprilija Lužar presented herself with the work Taxi Art – Women's TAXI – WATTA. She turned TAXI, artist's car/automobile, parked in front of The Museums Quartier, into artistic confessional. Random women visitors talked here, in front of the video camera, about their experiences with violence. From the seven video portraits a kind of public confession appeared.
An automobile is not an unusual space for confessions. A person usually feels good in it, as good as if he/she were at home.
In the car we relax, often talk to ourselves, often sing, and pick our noses, but also get power to talk with co-travellers about things that bothered us for a long time. For each of us a car is our second skin. It is a soothing, comforting and safe space. It lulls children to sleep, grown-ups into expectations. But also it is the space of violence, rape and death.
Yet a taxi is not any car. It is a carriage vehicle, creating 'interspaces' between personal and public, a space where different worlds encounter. Confession in the taxi, in a public mobile unit, is a metaphor for the art of Aprilija Lužar and activism in general.
Personal stories are being publicly confessed here. If  'conciliation'/ 'reconciliation', this specific state of the soul/mind during the confession, settled into society, every problem would be resolved. Yet the problems are still with us, and therefore Aprilija Lužar travels from place to place and with her art she sensitizes the public, women and men, to respond in such a way as to eliminate violence.