Aleksandra Domanović: Votives

A new commission of sculptures by Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981) investigate how technological advances impact on communication and culture.

Domanović’s work is of both the past and the future, folding the aesthetic of classical sculpture into her investigation into how developing technology relates to the societies that create it. For Domanović technology is always gendered. Her sculptures are a collision of references that reflect the circulation and reception of images in digital media.

Votives presents new sculptures made in the tradition of Greek Korai, sculptural dedications of female figures that hold offerings. Three of Domanović’s figures hold animals and fruit – taking their cue from votive statues from the Sanctuary of Hera in Samos, Greece, which are now housed in the Altes Museum in Berlin where the artist is based.

Another three sculptures reimagine the Korai in a sports context. Displayed alongside these six Votives stands a series of monolithic vertical monuments made of over 10,000 sheets of stacked A4 paper. These Paper Stacks address the reproducibility of images on the internet. Images are formed on each side of the sculptures by using the borderless function on an inkjet printer, a machine that less than a decade ago was the height of home-office technology, but now is near obsolete.

In our central gallery is the monumental votive Calf Bearer 2017. Over four metres tall, it draws on both Domanović’s recent research into molecular biology and the ancient Greek sculpture ‘Moscophoros’ – a statue of a man carrying a sacrificial calf on his shoulders. Presumed to have been built as a votive offering to the goddess Athena, it was found in fragments in the Athens Acropolis.

Votives also shows Turbo Sculpture 2010-13, a moving image work underscoring the artist’s concern with the public life of sculpture. It interrogates the phenomenon of public sculpture in the former Yugoslavia, the artist’s country of birth, dedicated to non-national media celebrities, such as Bruce Lee, Bob Marley and Samantha Fox.