For students at Witten/Herdecke University, the Field of Life incited artistic action. What can a student, focused on their development, contribute to the world? How can one participate from a distance? Sanja Sašo makes this possible. She involves the participants in the artistic process, awakens their senses, opens their eyes, provokes questions. Awareness is the beginning of change. Art assures us that transformation goes beyond a mental process and becomes reality. And so, during the semester, all sorts of situations came up with growing tension, increased participation, many controversies, and emerging consensus.
Michael Bockemuehl
The opportunity to change something finally presented itself. But the action took place only at the periphery - on the grass, easily accessible, but at the end it was just the background. The real theme - the pierced man, who upset people and made them take action, remained intact. Usually, we tend to adapt to the circumstances; we might lament a bit or – at best – we express our rage by participating from the margins, just enough to soothe our conscience and affirm our righteousness. Yet, in this case, the aesthetics were also destroyed.
Manfred Wandel
“… The exhibition projects of Sanja Sašo could most adequately entirely be described as a new practice in art, a resolute decision about avoiding repeats, but also as an equally consistent move away from any recent collectivistic premises.
Darko Glavan
“… Sanja Sašo is an artist who manifestly has an intense relationship with her material – with stone, earth, with palpable material, which in her artistic procedures she frequently breaks down, dematerializes, giving the material a fragile and at times an even dreamy quality.
When she puts stone heads on old, wooden, rural horse-drawn carts and arranges them in a long string on a ploughed hillock, when she brings earth into the cold hygienic space of an educational institution, or with an archetypal ship breaks through the glass shell of a gallery that divides the contents from the passersby, she is all the time privileging the material, alive and chthonic as it is, that is sometimes, over and above the concept, bare and quartered..”
It is also worth knowing here that Sašo is not afraid of the imprint of her own hand – does not refrain even in this new cycle from the cicatrices of rough wire, for the working process is just as important to her as the result – it is meditative, contemplative, refreshing and empowering.
Antonija Majača
“… The today’s return to esthetic values of the ancient great civilizations of the world and their beauty cults, does not mean regression, but perhaps the only possibility to return to the path of humanity, to humanistic ideals.”
Iva Körbler
“… A mystic sight, vision or Anagoge, is something the modern art mainly lost. Therefore the projects of Sanja Sašo attract us magically by the experienced vision, deep layers of meaning, originality, thus the ununiformed idea and realization.”
Liliana Domić
“It depends on him who passes me by whether I shall be dead or alive” – says Paul Valery in one of his verses. In other words, the “objective” value does not exist. Every object and every creature also exists by way of another object and another creature. And Sanja Sašo knows that.She is not alone in that knowledge. Participation, discussions, “correspondence” led by a given work, individual mythology of procedures and materials, systems of energy and tension among the individual forms and objects…none is bursting with youth. He who provides the dinner and he who just eats it are of equal worth and they condition one another in equal measure. The creator and the observer talk, they agree or they disagree. It is not a passive solution formula for all times. An experience is not just an emotional value, indeed it begins with identification. Here knowledge does not hurt, but it is not crucial...
Sanja Sašo’s suspended sculptures are her response to the challenges of the times and society in which she lives. Her criteria in selecting the materials and forms, and where she wants to place them, derive from her perception of reality and awareness of the problems we face in a world we analyze more and more but under- stand less and less.
Given her obsession with creating non-material sculpture she has chosen to use wire – a body shaped by wire gives an impression of a computer animation lacking in material weight, blank on the outside, fragile and translucent on the inside. For Sanja Sašo this »sculpted emptiness« is both a symbol of alienation, and a formal, figurative solution as a sculpture that speaks essentially of human beings. Human beings and human bodies are at the center of her reflection and creative preoccupation. Hence her need to place her wire sculptures in a natural environment, not just because a work of art set in nature creates a different effect from one located in a conventional exhibition area but above all because, to Sanja Sašo, a natural setting – in this case a cave, a symbol of shelter – becomes somewhere we go in order to save ourselves. This warning against the destructive times we live in is also a call for a return to the Earth as a natural element: a protected space and our own spiritual core. The impact of Sanja Sašo’s creativity possesses archetypal depth. This elemental power, apparent in the fragility and vulnerability of her wire sculptures, can initially appear nostalgic. But it is really a living, vibrant imprint of beauty – not lost, but rediscovered.
Bosiljka Perić-Kempf
Sanja Sašo’s suspended sculptures are her response to the challenges of the times and society in which she lives. Her criteria in selecting the materials and forms, and where she wants to place them, derive from her perception of reality and awareness of the problems we face in a world we analyze more and more but under- stand less and less.
Given her obsession with creating non-material sculpture she has chosen to use wire – a body shaped by wire gives an impression of a computer animation lacking in material weight, blank on the outside, fragile and translucent on the inside. For Sanja Sašo this »sculpted emptiness« is both a symbol of alienation, and a formal, figurative solution as a sculpture that speaks essentially of human beings. Human beings and human bodies are at the center of her reflection and creative preoccupation. Hence her need to place her wire sculptures in a natural environment, not just because a work of art set in nature creates a different effect from one located in a conventional exhibition area but above all because, to Sanja Sašo, a natural setting – in this case a cave, a symbol of shelter – becomes somewhere we go in order to save ourselves. This warning against the destructive times we live in is also a call for a return to the Earth as a natural element: a protected space and our own spiritual core. The impact of Sanja Sašo’s creativity possesses archetypal depth. This elemental power, apparent in the fragility and vulnerability of her wire sculptures, can initially appear nostalgic. But it is really a living, vibrant imprint of beauty – not lost, but rediscovered.
Bosiljka Perić-Kempf