Series 4

height: 62 cm

Because of the basic shape, these vases can also be classified as Qiqiu Ping. The motif recalls the blue and white qingbai style, which derives from Song dynasty.
Earlier examples of vases of this style are smaller, while the size of the later specimens indicates they must have been used for flowers.

Series 2

height: 30cm

For the glaze, three colours are used: white, green and blue. Two sevensyllable quatrians are featured on the vase, their motifs interweaving. The first two verses are part of the poem.
A Young Man Goes of the calligrapher and poet Du Fu (712-770). The second two verses were created three centuries later, and are part of the poem Ode to Chrysanthemum ascribed to writer and philosopher Wang Anshi-ju (1021-1086). The author of the last quatrain Breaking Orchid Twigs is the writer and painter Zheng Banqiao (1693-1765).

Recycling deals with processing the mass production objects, as well as the information coming from mass media.

In a case of working at the objects of mass-production my intervention does not transform the matter from which these objects are made, however, it changes their form.

The work titled SERIES deals with the issue of series and unique items, and is an example of the act of recycling the products of mass-production. A vase is an object-product that cannot be called a work anymore, nor it can be referred to as a unique product, since the production process exclusively targets at the profit that abolishes any phenomena – e.g. from tradition to continuity – that could either lessen or deprive it.
I bot three identical vases from one of the China shops. Following a principle of archaeological documenting, I frame an archaeological drawing of the vase as the only convincing evidence of the same vase’s original. Then I demolish all the vases and re-compose them into new forms and cover them with “a glass-bell”.
Though, the new vases are defined by their old form and colour, yet each of them is unique and different. The series is made of seven differing strings of vases.

Recreating the original

The recent projects of Lara Badurina thematise the relationships of work, production and consumption in the conditions of everyday life. How the processes of transition and globalization are reflected in given situations, how they change the evaluation of artistic work and production – these are some of some of the questions that the artist raises. Attempts at mapping out the different roles and positions that work occupies inside complex social and economic relations of course covers the investigation of one's own position on the art market and the market for labor in general. Is the concept of work understood as a creative and productive and ennobling activity – which has almost totally died out in the processes of economic production – still sustainable, and how is it positioned in the domain of art? In an attempt at answering this question the distinction between work and job plays an important role: while a job often functions repressively, work, as quality coming into being, is profiled as a king of restricted area of struggle (class, professional, political). From this point of view, work today functions as perhaps the last romantic concept of identity *. “Today people can achieve new identities, only if they are allowed to do what they are interested in, something that they can be proud of. The number of such possibilities is increasingly small.” **

Following up such thinking, the Series of Lara Badurina endeavors to juxtapose and confront the phenomenon of mass production and her own artistic gesture, studying the fields of mutual overlap and departure with respect to the role of work.

Lara's playing with museal manners of presentation points to the thematisation of original and copy and to the process of the aesthetic revaluation of the valueless objects of mass production. However, the artist` s intervention also covers that invisible, immaterial level of the process of work. Following the logic and rules of her own imagination, the artist goes a step backwards; by the re-finalisation of the work, she endeavors to revalue devalued work itself and raise it to new level. The symbolism of this artistic gesture is not devoid of internal tensions and paradoxes. From the fragments of the existing the new is obsessively recreated by a process of work almost equally as laborious, patient and pointless as that of the sweatshops. And yet, the process of work itself, in spite of and actually because of its fragility, heads off in anther directions.

Ana Dević, 2006.

* Mike Hentz, interviewed by Eda Čufer, “Zarez, 14.03.2002.#76 originally published in “Svet umetnosti”, SCCA, Ljubljana, 2001
** ibid