Craquelure, Pavo and me
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- Craquelure, Pavo and me
- 2023-2024
- performance
Slaven Tolj’s performance “Craquelure Pavo & Me” is an act of remembrance and exposure: the artist offers his own body here as a fragile surface where history, friendship, and trauma leave their cracks. This work is dedicated to Tolj’s friend, the photographer Pavo Urban, who was killed in 1991 at the age of 23 during the shelling of Dubrovnik after having photographed the atrocities of the Yugoslav Wars. Tolj exposes his own body as a living craquelure, its skin marked by loss and war. He sits naked on a chair after having gradually undressed and rests in a simple, near-motionless gesture. His body, slowed by illness, presents vulnerability as a form of testimony. The “me” in the title is not just Tolj himself but also the audience, which is drawn into a shared space of fragility. The cracks, literal in Urban’s photographs but metaphorical in Tolj’s body, transmit experience and prompt questions about mortality, disappearance, and memory’s persistence. This work was first enacted in February 2023 at the Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna during Tolj’s eponymous solo exhibition. The performance shown in the video was carried out in November 2024 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris during Kontakt’s exhibition “The Cynics Republic,” which was curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc. W.S.