Once and Again

This exhibition invites us to contemplate manifestations of repetition as an essential part of how we perceive and act within the world around us. Consciously and unconsciously, we constantly repeat ourselves — repeat actions, return to situations and places, revisit images. We repeat mistakes time and again, sometimes by choice, at other times out of necessity, or habit. Repetition creates a sense of continuity and regulates time and space. Its undulations create rhythm, memory, and meaning.

In the works presented here, repetition functions as an inherent poetic, material, and technological principle: photographed spaces reconstructed in 3D software, familiar icons fused into a new image, repetitive acts of repair, and patterned ceramic tiles, where repetition is a prerequisite. In this context, repetition is not necessarily presented as compulsive or pathological, but rather as a working method and a cognitive tool – as a way to endure a complex reality.

The repetition in these works does not strive for perfection; instead, it exposes the gaps between source and representation, between intention and result. It acts as a form of correction and refinement, or is driven by inertia, with no clear purpose. It may create pleasure, or inflict suffering.

Repetition may stem from within as an impulse, a need, or a mechanism attempting to organize our individual life experience. Yet it is also imposed upon us from the outside, when political, social, and historical conditions and processes force us to return over and over again to similar states. At present, our immediate reality is caught in a relentless cycle of emergencies, violence, and war. In this persistent loop, repetition reveals its most intense form as a collective pattern, in which time moves in a circle and reality struggles to break beyond its own boundaries.

This exhibition does not seek to find a solution to this situation or to offer ways of moving forward. It offers an observation of a recurring action turned into a structure with its own inherent content. It invites us to examine how repetition can create a space of inhalation and exhalation, of holding on and letting go.