Meta Grgurevič deals with questions of intimacy; cleansed elements of everyday life, traces of history and memory, playfulness of figures, enhanced triviality of objects and pop culture.
The video Dream to Recall Forgotten Thoughts is a part of a more complex project Lucid Dream (HIAP open studio, Cable Factory, Helsinki, 2012), in which Meta Grgurevič contemplated the tension between ideas, i.e., a brilliant conception, and reality, which often opposes the former. The artist, however, does not limit herself only to the age-old antagonism between ideals and reality; the conceptual core of the exhibition is a deliberation on a hypothetical space (or even a state), which is exposed to reality, but at the same time remains autonomous. The works within the project are inspired particularly by two key figures from the fields of science and art - Nikola Tesla and Vladimir Tatlin. Both wanted to improve the world with their work, but their idealism shattered on the wall of reality, and the once vigorous, even seemingly achievable, ideas became a part of the history of impossible.
The counterpoint to the works is the video Dream to Recall Forgotten Thoughts. The speech delivered by Charlie Chaplin in the role of the great dictator Adenoid Hynkel is the strongest narrative component of the video. The video accents the utopian connotations of the other works (implied by referencing Tesla and Tatlin) and at the same time connects the past, present and future, both in its aesthetics and content matter. Despite the seemingly idealistic message the video is marked by a certain ambivalence - we are listening to Chaplin, who was one of the first to openly attack Nazism, and simultaneously to an elated dictator, who was formed in circumstances not too dissimilar from the present.
