Ana Likar
She Made Storms (Marina Češarek Gallery), 2024
In this video installation, the artist links three events: the witch trials in Ribnica and the trial of Marina Češarek in 1701; the brief period in 1987 when the Mikl House was renamed the Marina Češarek Gallery for the duration of Jošt Rotar’s exhibition; and the devastating flood that struck these spaces in the summer of 2023. Seemingly unconnected histories are linked by natural disasters, the processes of preservation and archiving, and the fact that Marina Češarek was most likely born in the Mikl House. The text that accompanies the video is based on historical documents and conversations with experts. However, the attempt to interpret it in the Ribnica dialect and to include the linguistic slips that occurred in the process transforms the rigid structure of interrogations, museums, and archives into repeated failures and repetitions. Thus the artist takes us to a cave in Klek where women accused of witchcraft are said to have gathered, to the Marina Češarek Gallery, which she has brought to life through her work, and along the paths of the (late) search for St John’s wort, which was used to extort the truth from the accused but also as a medicine for wounds and sadness.
Produced in the framework of the EMPACT project with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
video installation, HD video, 10 min 30 sec, still frame, music: rouge-ah, voice: Darja Modic Likar, voice recording: Luka Likar, translation: Daniel Sheppard, expert advisor: Tea Hvala, archive material: Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and Mikl House Archives (in collaboration with Dr Matevž Košir and Ana Pucelj), courtesy of the artist
Ana Likar (1996) is a visual artist whose artistic practice combines ecology and the paradoxes of preservation and archiving, focussing in particular on how power relations are articulated through our understanding of the natural. Her work mainly comprises installations, videos, and texts and has been exhibited internationally. She has staged solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana (2022), Mikl House Gallery, Ribnica (2022), SCCA Ljubljana (2022), Slovenian Museum of Natural History, Ljubljana (2022) and P74 Gallery in Ljubljana (2021), and exhibited in group shows at the Klima Biennale in Vienna, Austria (2024), the 13th Biennial of Young Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Macedonia (2023), the Youth Biennial in Belgrade, Serbia (2023) and the mumok in Vienna (2022). She graduated from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2021 and is currently studying at the University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt. She is the winner of the 2023 OHO Award.
