Saša Bezjak / Needle in a Haystack

6 July – 18 August 2024
Opening: Saturday, 6 July 2024, 19:00

In the framework of the EMPACT project, the artist Saša Bezjak developed a series of 21 original drawings on textiles. The drawings were inspired by photographs by Terezija Mostler (1881–1961), a pioneering Slovene photographer, who spent part of her life in Trate, Slovenia. The photographs on which the embroidered drawings are based are from the collection of the Museum of Madness and depict a now distant way of life in the Slovenian countryside of the past. During a workshop on the topic of empathy for nature at the Museum of Madness Trate in September 2023, participants embroidered the drawings onto the fabric. The series of drawings and embroideries Needle in a Haystack (2024) will be presented in an exhibition at the Judgement Tower of the Maribor Minoriti in July and August as a Collateral Environment of EKO 9.

To seek the needle in the haystack is to look for something that is hidden, something that is enveloped by so much else that it prevents us from accessing what we are searching for. In her drawings of country life in the middle of Slovenske gorice, Saša Bezjak presents an almost entirely lost way of existing in the environment where she herself lives and works today. In her search of lost time, it is the photographs of Terezija Mostler that serve as the Proustian madeleines, awakening memories. Mostler, a photographer with a fascinating biography, yet still underappreciated, spent the last period of her life in humble circumstances in Trate, where she documented life around her. In Mostler’s photographs from the middle of the last century, Saša Bezjak recognises a great dived between the way of life today and in the not-so-distant past, without falling into nostalgia or making generalised value judgements about the good old days. Rather, she is interested in relationships and social structures, and uses the contours of the individual elements of rural life to pull a thread between the layers of understanding of these relationships then and now: the relationship between human and more than human, people and the annual cycle of working on the land and its associated customs, between children and adults, attitudes to time, socialising, work, position and gender roles in society. This also establishes an interesting parallel between the two artists, working in the same environment with just half a century between them: both closely connected to the community, yet unconventional and idiosyncratic. Saša Bezjak and her collaborators, the needleworkers of the large-scale embroidery series Needle in a Haystack, have created a monumental work, a poetic, layered, critical monument to community, memory and environment.

EMPACT / Compassion for Nature, Embroidery workshop with artist Saša Bezjak, 18 and 19 September 2023, Castle Cmurek by Trate / Museum of Madness, photo by Jakob Vogrinec and Urška Dokl