Graphic works by Gabriela Hajzer on display in Student Cultural Center in New Belgrade between March 16 and 28

An exhibition of graphic works by Gabriela Hajzer was opened at 7 PM on March 16 in the Student Cultural Center in New Belgrade and will be closed on March 28.

"I saw Gabriela Hajzer's graphic works for the first time at the end of last summer in Opatija and then I thought of them as dreams. They reminded me of the moment when we wake up in the morning and realize that the entirety of the dream we've just had has disappeared forever from our memory, leaving us only with its fragments.

Then I thought that Gabriela's graphic works were like lost dreams.

However, when I look at her works now, at the beginning of the new year, I do not think about dreams anymore. Also, I do not think about the sea that, back in Opatija, seemed to be a part of them. Instead, I think about short stories and that Gabriela's graphic works speak more with what has been left out than what is present, exactly in the way a short story is written. Only the most basic things are revealed; an indication of movement or an announcement of stillness is sketched; there is only a partial indication of space; what was before and what is about to happen has to be shaped up by the spectator or the reader or, why not, the story itself. Gabriela begins the story, determines its coordinates, and then leave it to us, so that we are actually the ones who build the story, finish the drawing, dream the dream.

I am returning to the dream because the space Gabriela shows is both interior and exterior at the same time - we are simultaneously in front of and behind the door and windows and if we choose to enter the building, we will come out of it; if we climb the internal stairs, we will go down the external ones; if we sit at the table in the room, we will find ourselves sitting at the table in the yard. Life in that world is only a sliver, an image within the image, a snapshot framed by a window or door frame. In any case, the real world is always somewhere else, hidden by a curtain or offered as a detail, as a fragment. It is not even a story, but only a part of the story, a fragment of the fragment, a dream that melts down and disappears.

This can already be the beginning of a story similar to many stories that have begun in these drawings: a kiss beneath the window, an empty bed, a woman lighting the Saturday candles, a woman who is leaving.... There is also a story about two fishes hanging on a wall, and it seems to me that I also saw two birds on a door. If they are not there anymore, that is only a sign that they have flown away. Stories, however, always stay, regardless of what happens, the same as Gabriela's works, created somewhere between oblivion and memory, in the shady area where dreams become reality just to turn back into dreams again." David Albahari.

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