Silvio Vujičić: Nocturne

• 20.09.2025 - 19.10.2025

At the start of the autumn season, Art Pavilion presents the third sequence of the exhibition Who Is Elsa Fluid – That Is Well Known. It is the Nocturne by artist Silvio Vujičić, installed in the Botanical Garden pavilion, which he inhabits with the reminiscence of a chemistry laboratory while reflecting on the invisible living world. The mystical, duality-laden nature of Elsa Fluid intertwines here with dark substances and the darkness of night.

Who is Elsa Fluid? An apparition, a hallucination, an intoxication, a remedy – or the flower of a night bloom, the deadly datura?

The ambience/sound installation Vujičić has built for the Botanical Garden pavilion may recall a chemistry lab or a sophisticated alchemical cabinet from the future. At its centre is the datura plant of mythic stature, with medicinal, hallucinogenic, and even lethal properties. Through chemical processes, the artist extracts poisonous alkaloids, applies them to a screen, and fixes their stratification with a camera – the brief journey and appearance of these deadly substances that lasts only seconds. The result is a vision materialized as image: a hallucination, a toxic matter…

Set in the Botanical Garden pavilion, Silvio’s work is a space-time inversion. What is outside is drawn inside, the interior becomes exterior, and time is compressed in a timelapse of datura’s night blooming. One might imagine it as a shell that coils distant spaces and differently paced time into its spiral interior, sending back resonances when we press it to the ear. We can imagine the entire Botanical Garden we know from daytime walks being drawn into the pavilion’s central space dominated by Silvio’s installation, from which it spills outwards, turned inside out. We discover what happens at night: the seduction of datura’s nocturnal blossom, the evaporation of alkaloids; we hear the sounds of small mammals, bats, of despised moths, and other nocturnal beings. We picture greedy bats drawing up datura’s nectar with their long tongues, carrying poisonous pollen on their small black bodies, their evening shadows unsettling us. It conjures vampires, witchcraft, and magic – something dangerous, because it can entice and bewitch us; we can lose our heads, overwhelmed by the obscure regions of our own minds. Yet it is not only seduction. Datura is a medicinal plant. Its fragrant depth is a pool of dualities, a liminal space of light and darkness.

Rationality of the modern age battles ambiguity and undecidability by constructing binary systems. Language is the medium of the rational mind and a human specificity within the not-only-human world. This is another level of Silvio’s work. By subjecting language/word/script to the evaporation of alkaloids, he suspends its exclusive role in forming and explaining the world. Perhaps, indeed, instead of the precision of language we might rely on the tingling we feel, or our premonition of nearness – on intuition that cannot be fully explained in words, yet helps us grasp that the unfathomable also exists. Words written in alkaloid disintegrate and disappear. This time Elsa Fluid is an existence beyond language.

Curator: Irena Bekić