“Home” is our longing for something we’ve lost but never had and under the subsequent premise that life is an expedition, we present the contemporary Odysseuses Violetta Ehnsperg in an exhibition dedicated to the somewhat legendary figure of Cheb Dargeob. Both of them travelers between east and west, using encounters, relationships, dispositions and tempers to weave bonds of mystical meaning. In an ongoing pulse between Belgrade, Berlin, Budapest and Beč, both seek similar settings in which their artistic and cultural epiphanies take place.

All these impressions and creative impulses manifest themselves in Ehnsperg’s latest large scale textile installation. Started in Vienna and assuming it’s final form here in Belgrade, the artwork is a traveller itself, creating its own home wherever it takes shape. Just like a nomadic tent and with references to the cultural and semantic importance of the rug. Searching for a home one never knew, creating a new one from memory and idealized expectations over and over again in every new settlement. 

Regardless if from the domestic sphere or if associated with sacred rituals, rugs mark spaces of exception. They transform places in which they are laid out into something unique and exclusive. The rug has the power to isolate people and objects that enter it, defining a “spiritual area” with its own rules that bring the confusion of life into a temporary order promissing a finite perfection. Embodying powerful symbols in different cultures, rugs become filters that reinforce a suspension of reality as they mark a possibility for divine connections.

The search for the “lost” seems to be over, they represent the Garden of Eden or delimit a sacred ground for prayer and have always been surrounded by the mystical: from One Thousand and One Nights, to Solomon’s green silk carpet, to the Russian folk tales of Ivan the Fool, to Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, the ‘flying’ carpet is a common trope in legends, myths and religions.

In this exhibition the life of Dargeob and and the artistic practice of Ehnsperg intertwine to take shape at this particular time and this specific junction where the crossroads come together for a brief moment, just to entice away again into all directions of the compass.

Denis Leo Hegic and Jan Gustav Fiedler
Curators