INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC, PROFESSIONAL AND ARTS CONFERENCE
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INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC, PROFESSIONAL AND ARTS CONFERENCE
EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES
Critical Instrumentation, Exhibitive and Curatorial Narratives
online on Google Meet, in English and Croatian meet.google.com/cay-kjwc-zsp
10–12 March 2022
CO-ORGANIZERS Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split and Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA Croatia)
KEYNOTE LECTURERS Ana Dević (WHW/What, How & for Whom), Professor James Elkins, PhD (Art Institute of Chicago), Professor Lev Manovich, PhD (The Graduate Center, City University of New York/Cultural Analytics Lab), Damir Gamulin and Antun Sevšek, Ivana Bago, PhD, Associate Professor Miriam De Rosa, PhD (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice) and Associate Professor Beti Žerovc, PhD (Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana)
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Professor Marina Gržinić, PhD, from the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana; Associate Professor Asja Mandić, PhD, from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Sarajevo; Assistant Professor Neli Ružić from the Arts Academy of the University of Split; alongside Assistant Professor Silva Kalčić, PhD, from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Split, President of AICA Croatia
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE ASSISTANTS
Miona Muštra and Anđelko Mihanović, PhD, former attendees of the art criticism workshop “Writing on Contemporary Art” in Zagreb and Split.
VISUAL IDENTITY
Niko Mihaljević. Vladimir Jakolić, photo from the Exhibition of Women and Men, June 26, 1969, Student Centre Gallery, Zagreb. Fine Arts Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb, Inv. No.: SC-46/F1
This conference is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Exhibitive Cartographies
10 – 12 March 2022
EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES (CRITICAL INSTRUMENTATION, EXHIBITIVE AND CURATORIAL NARRATIVES)
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this conference is to present, examine and contextualise curatorial practices in contemporary art more comprehensively the for the first time in Croatian art history. It is important to note that the history of curatorial practices is a relatively little studied area in Croatian art history, while it is increasingly present at the international level. Our objective with this conference is to address this important subject at the crossroads of art criticism, theory and practice. There has been an increasing interest in exhibition history and contextualisation of curatorial practices in art-historical research. While we can trace back exhibition history in the modern sense of a universal right to publicness to the revolutionary turmoils of the late 18th century, it was the avant-garde tendencies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that gave the history of exhibition practices a new dimension, paving the way for innovative methods, participation and the questioning of existing institutional policies, contextual frameworks and models of presentation. The emergence of neo-avantgarde and the institutional critique of the 1950s and 1960s destabilised the conventional meanings and institutional positions of artists, artworks, curators and audiences, which led to a more active role of curators in mediating new artistic expressions, but also to a radical questioning of their own position. Curators became increasingly active in the creation of meaning, assuming more and more often, with their gestures or texts, the role of meta-artists, especially in the domain of conceptual art. Redefining the position of the curator-author has increasingly come into focus since the emergence of conceptual/neo-avantgarde tendencies in art.
The starting point of the conference is the curatorial figure of Želimir Koščević, the 2018 laureate of AICA Croatia’s Annual Award and Lifetime Achievement Award. Irradiated by late modernism but also by counterculture in the former country, as a relatively young art historian, Želimir Koščević won a fellowship at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. In 1969 – a period of radical social progress – he worked as an assistant to its then director, Pontus Hultén, in organising the legendary Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World! exhibition that featured gestures and attitudes in lieu of material artworks, thereby opening up exhibition space not only for early conceptual practice but also for radical politics by encouraging supporters of Black Panthers to gather within the exhibition. The echo of the avant-garde’s entangling of life and art and the view of art as a transformative engine of social and political perception that was present in Pontus Hultén’s practice would go on to motivate Koščević to take on a more experimental and daring approach to exhibition curating, but also to question the very exhibition format, which he continued to do in his curatorial beginnings, upon his return to Zagreb. This reshaping of Koščević’s curating (and ‘student practice’) preceded his return to Zagreb and coincided with the programmatic openness and the generation’s artistic experimentation at the Student Centre in Zagreb. Koščević worked there between 1966 and 1979 as head of the SC Gallery, and during this period introduced a series of innovations to its programme. Some of the innovations in Koščević’s early curatorial approach include the exhibitions Imaginary Museum, Exhibition of Women and Men, Hit Parade, Postal Delivery and Total Action, held both outside and inside the SC Gallery. These exhibitions encouraged experimental practices and provided space to young artists; they opened up to an international exchange of ideas, interdisciplinarity, departure from the gallery and democratisation of art. A gallery newspaper was also published, aimed at self-contextualisation.
The conference is conceived as the final part of the workshop “Writing on Contemporary Art” which focused on analysing the role of the curator, institutional or non-institutional. The role of the contemporary art curator has radically expanded in the art world in the last few decades, and we could argue that the curatorial figure – whether one working within an institution or independently and non-institutionally – is a pivotal segment in understanding contemporary art. The main coordinates of this workshop range from drawing attention to the role of curators and curatorial collectives when acquiring relevant insights into the contemporary cultural context to examining the role of museums and galleries in contemporary society. By reviewing an exhibition event or how a particular collection is displayed, we examine the selection policies (acquisition policies, choice of exhibits). We examine how curators – with their critical and theoretical texts but also their practice – shape the history of contemporary art and anticipate/create future tendencies; we can also see how artists assume curatorial positions at museums, applying artistic methods – in lieu of linear museological narratives – such as the use of permanent collections or existing artefacts as materials, playing with the ways of seeing and with the exhibition as an all-around experience.
As part of the workshop, James Elkins held a public lecture on 20 January 2022 in Zagreb. The workshop was held in Split and also in Rijeka, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU) – Ksenija Orelj, Branka Benčić and Sabina Salamon – as well as in Zagreb, in collaboration with the Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Institute for Contemporary Art and Nova Gallery. It was led by Silva Kalčić, Ivana Meštrov and Ksenija Orelj; parts of the workshop were led by Janka Vukmir and Tomislav Pavelić, David Maljković and Ivana Meštrov, Ana Kovačić and Lea Vene.
Programme and Book of Abstracts
PROGRAMME Thursday, 10 March
Session 1 NEW ART HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY CURATORSHIP
Chair Silva Kalčić, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia / Croatian section of AICA
10:00 – 13:30 h
Lev Manovich
Annotating the Invisible: How to Create a Planetary Art History?
Izabela Kowalczyk
A Need for Radical Social Practices in Contemporary Curatorship
Cristian Nae
Curating as Art: Experiments in Collective Curating in Late Socialist Romania
Niko Mihaljević
The Skull Speaks
Sandro Đukić
Memory as the Construct of Present-Day Social Discourses
Ewa Wójtowicz
Curating a Cloud. Data-Driven Cartographies in Recent Curatorial and Artistic Practices
Discussion
PROGRAMME Thursday, 10 March
Session 2 NARRATIVES FROM CURATORS’ PRACTICE IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Chair Cristian Nae, George Enescu National University of Arts, Iasi, Romania
15:00 – 18:30 h
Dora Derado
Artistic Displays in Display Windows: Where Art and Life Meet
Silva Kalčić
Several Topics from the History of Curatorial Practices in Croatian Contemporary Art
James Elkins
How Curation Can Imply Narratives
Jasmina Fučkan
Permanent Collection Exhibition and Contemporary Artists in the Museum of Arts and Crafts from 2009 to 2020
Igor Loinjak
On the Specifics of the Phenomenon of Curatorial Practices in the Context of the Osijek POPUP Project (2012 – 2017)
Jasna Jakšić
A Society Without Art: The Curatorial Work of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos
Discussion
Annotating the Invisible: How to Create a Planetary Art History?
Lev Manovich
Heinrich Wölfflin envisioned “art history without names” in the early twentieth century. As the discipline grew, it took a different path, becoming “art history with some names”, as I like to call it. In art-historical accounts of modern art, only a tiny percentage of artists who lived in the last two centuries are included. While local publications and museums provide better coverage of a country’s art than any single “international” account, the same issue exists on the local level.
Is it possible to create an “art history with all the names”, one that encompasses everyone? Many projects in the fields of digital humanities, cultural analytics and data science have shown that it is possible to analyze billions of cultural objects created by millions of creators. I will demonstrate and discuss examples of such projects in my talk, which will include work from my Cultural Analytics Lab. Additionally, I will discuss how such a larger-scale art history can provide us with new maps and timelines of modern art that place regions such as Eastern Europe in the center rather than on the periphery.
Dr. Lev Manovich is a pioneering digital culture theorist, writer, and artist. He was included in the list of “25 People Shaping the Future of Design” in 2013 and the list of “50 Most Interesting People Building the Future” in 2014. Between 1991 and today, he has published 180 articles and 15 books that include Artificial Aesthetics. A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design, Cultural Analytics, AI Aesthetics, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, and The Language of New Media, described as “the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan”. Manovich’s digital art projects were shown in over 110 international exhibitions in Centre Pompidou, ICA London, ZKM, KIASMA, The Walker Art Center and other leading venues. Manovich is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab.
A Need for Radical Social Practices in Contemporary Curatorship
Izabela Kowalczyk
In this paper I want to reflect on curatorial political engagement.
In many cases contemporary art not only adopts a critical attitude towards stereotypes rooted in our mentality. It can draw attention to the contradictions present in our reality and allow us to think without offering obvious solutions. In this way, it can help us to better grasp at least a fragment of our reality, e.g. by asking difficult questions about social issues. Similarly, the exhibition may become a kind of public forum where important, political issues are taken up and discussed. This is particularly evident in the case of feminist exhibitions.
In the case of the region of Central Europe, one of the most important exhibitions was Gender Check by Bojana Pejić (2008, 2009). This presentation let for some comparisons between avant-garde artworks and socialist realism works, tracing the construction of gender, fields of constraint and violation as well as fields of subversion. It was a historic exhibition; Bojana Pejić aimed to rewrite the history of contemporary art in Eastern and Central Europe in the context of gender issues.
I want to pay attention to a different strategy that is a kind of political intervention. Here I mean some exhibitions organized in Poland in the context of the current situation for Polish women and the introduction of strong anti-abortion law. Polish women have organized Black Protests and Women Strikes since 2016. The protests have developed their own symbolism, using contemporary artistic strategies that emphasize community action and solidarity. Many artworks related to the issue of women’s rights were produced.
Some of the exhibitions focused on activism and showed artworks as well as other material (banners, leaflets, movies, etc.). I curated one such exhibition, Polish Women, Patriots, Rebels at the Arsenal Gallery in Poznań in 2017. The main aim of this show was to reflect on the situation of Polish women as citizens, participants in public life, patriots and demonstrators taking part in the Black Protests against the attempts to strengthen the anti-abortion law.
In 2020, the Polish government started to work on new anti-abortion legislation and this is why the protests broke out again. The April protests were organised as car blockades and queues to freedom in front of supermarkets or pharmacies, because of the pandemic restrictions. After the Constitutional Court ruling of 22nd October 2020, huge protests were organised in all of Poland, in cities and towns, gathering thousands of people. New exhibitions were organized, such as You’ll Never Walk Alone at the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin in late 2020 and early 2021. At the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the exhibition Who Will Write the History of Tears. Artists on Women’s Rights is still on view (26.11.2021–23.03.2022).
I want to reflect on how the artistic material interferes with the non-artistic in the cases of all these exhibitions. I propose a thesis that we need a new curatorial attitude or eventually we should come back to radical social practices from 1968 and later. The postulate of transforming the world, also through artistic actions, is still relevant, even more so than ever before. I mean here also such issues as the refugee crisis, threat of new world war in Europe and climate crisis.
Izabela Kowalczyk, PhD is an art and cultural historian, art critic and curator. She works as an associate professor at the University of Arts in Poznan, where she is also Dean of Art Education and Curatorial Studies Department. She is the author of publications on critical art, feminist art, interpretations of recent history, etc. Her publications, among others, include books: Ciało i władza. Polska sztuka krytyczna lat 90. [Body and Power in Polish Critical Art in the 1990s], 2002, Podróż do przeszłości. Interpretacje najnowszej historii w polskiej sztuce krytycznej [A Travel to the Past. Interpretations of Recent History in Polish Critical Art], 2010, and about 250 articles. She took part in the preparation and research for the exhibition Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna, Warsaw, 2008, 2009). She curated several exhibitions of Polish contemporary art.
Curating as Art: Experiments in Collective Curating in Late Socialist Romania
Cristian Nae
My presentation analyses the activity of Romanian artists Wanda Mihuleac and Constantin Flondor as exhibition-makers in Romania during the 1980s. I frame their practice, on the one hand, as collective curatorial work and, on the other hand, as a curatorial process derived from conceptual art, system aesthetics and Herve Fisher’s “contextual art”. Most of the group exhibitions I examine, such as The Study (1981), The Writing (1980), Space as a Mirror and Space as Objecthood (1986), were organized by Mihuleac or Flondor in cooperation with fellow artists and art critics (such as Paul Gherasim, Mihai Drișcu, etc.). They questioned the principles of curatorial authorship associated today with visionary, albeit authoritarian male curators such as Harald Szeemann, and promoted experimental investigations of the exhibition as an artistic medium. The exhibition space was conceived either as a preparatory model, a collective art studio (The Study) or a multidisciplinary laboratory (The Writing), or as reflecting on its own condition (Space as Objecthood). A special case study I intend to examine is House Party (1988), an event co-organized by Wanda Mihuleac, Decebal Scriba and others, which may be analysed not only as “apartment art” (Tupytsin), blurring the boundaries between artistic intervention, the private sphere and everyday life, but also as redefining the art exhibition as a performative and processual event.
Cristian Nae (Iași, Romania) is Associate Professor at the National University of Arts in Iași, where he teaches critical theory, exhibition studies and contemporary art history. His research focuses on exhibition histories and critical art practices in Eastern and Central Europe after the 1960s. He received research grants and fellowships from the Romanian National Research Council (CNCS), Erste Foundation, the CAA-Getty International Program, the Getty Foundation, and the New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest. His most recent studies were included in Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes and Approaches (2020) and Realisms of the Avant-Garde (2020). He edited the book (In)Visible Frames: Rhetoric and Experimental Exhibition Practices in Romanian Art 1965–1989 (2019) and co-edited the book Contemporary Romanian Art 2010-2020 (2020). Currently, he is vice-president of AICA Romania.
The Skull Speaks
Niko Mihaljević
The talk is about two of my recent projects that deal with different aspects of curating, collecting and cataloguing: Museum of the Crystal Skull and Mascaron Speaks (Of a Stone of an Unidentified Kind, of a Snake Curled Up in a Spiral, of a Shallow Dish with a Lid, of a Thick Green Patina with a Dull Shine—). Both projects explore the role of the artist-curator, either starting a new museum collection or working with an existing one.
The Museum of the Crystal Skull is an independent artist-run museum dedicated to the transition of the phenomenon of crystal skulls into contemporary popular culture. The famous central artifact – which is missing from the collection and is only there in spirit – is the mysterious Mitchell-Hedges’ crystal skull. It is a copy of a human skull sculpted from a single block of quartz crystal with supposedly magical properties, made famous by the TV series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Apart from encouraging many pseudoscientific theories and a global new age religious movement, this esoteric artifact inspired a variety of pop culture products, such as: the fourth film in the Indiana Jones series, an episode of the science fiction series Stargate SG-1, an episode of the graphic novel Martin Mystère, a 7-inch record by American heavy metal band Mastodon, a luxurious Crystal Head Vodka brand owned by Hollywood actor Dan Aykroyd, etc. These cultural artifacts are the focus of the Museum of the Crystal Skull. They are sourced mostly through classified ads or eBay and kept within the Museum.
The Museum eventually struck a new collaboration – last year I was invited to work with the Benko Horvat Collection which was donated to the City of Zagreb in 1946 and has since been managed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The collection contains mostly archaeological finds with a minor section of paintings and graphic art from the 15th–18th centuries. The only artifact that (literally) spoke to me was a mascaron, a grotesque anthropomorphic marble head from 2nd-century Syracuse, Sicily. Its function was probably to spout water from a building, as suggested by its widely open mouth. I organized a series of orations for Mascaron during which it addressed the audience through the PA system. Mascaron spoke about itself and other artifacts from the collection. Its speech was compiled from the Benko Horvat Collection catalogue, focusing on the dry yet poetic language of archaeological cataloguing.
Niko Mihaljević (b. 1985 Split, Croatia) is an artist and a graphic designer. He graduated from the Werkplaats Typografie (ArtEZ Institute of the Arts) in Arnhem, Netherlands. In 2016 he received the Radoslav Putar Award (Young Visual Artist Award) for the best Croatian artist under 40 years of age. His artistic endeavors include composing a 130-year-long sound composition (www.onwatersmokethe.com) and publishing a philosophical dialogue proving that a small island in the Adriatic is indeed land surrounded by water (Circumnavigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse, 2016). He is an assistant professor at the Department of Media Design, University North, Croatia. He is an independent graphic designer with an interest in researching and documenting vernacular design in the broadest sense (Stan Zagreb: An Archive of Zagreb Housing, 09/2015–11/2015 with Iva Maria Jurić and Wide Selection of Italian Trousers: A4 Vernacular Graphic Design of Zagreb, 2016).
Memory as the Construct of Present-Day Social Discourses
Sandro Đukić
The presentation entitled Memory as the Construct of Present-Day Social Discourses will focus on a few projects in which the author was using an archive as a medium for creating artworks, as well as treating the archive as an artwork itself. Based on the presented methods, one can also clearly speculate about the dual character of those practices; on the one hand, this could be considered as creating a work of art, and on the other, as curating the archives. The blurred line between those two discourses is used as a strategy for elaborating on various subjects of artistic interest, as well as a questioning of the idea of reality and its representation.
Sandro Đukić is a multimedia artist from Zagreb, Croatia, who is interested in cultural and anthropological phenomena of the image, through the relations of presentation and representation, intermediality, media research and the links among artistic works and phenomena. He got his degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb (class of Đuro Seder) in 1989. He studied in the new media class at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1989 to 1993 as a visiting and a regular student (class of Nam June Paik), and then attended Nan Hoover’s master workshop between 1993 and 1994. He is an awarded artist who participated in various international residency programs and presented talks at numerous local and international symposia. He was a guest lecturer at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, as well as at the Academy of Drama Arts, University of Zagreb. He is a board member of the Nan Hoover Foundation.
Curating a Cloud. Data-Driven Cartographies in Recent Curatorial and Artistic Practices
Ewa Wójtowicz
Coined for the purpose of the rhetoric of conquest of cyberspace, the notion of a cloud gains a new meaning starting from the perspective of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). After applying some ideas of this theory within infrastructural studies, the cloud-related technical infrastructure can be seen as an important actor of contemporary culture. Also, if the cloud, according to Tung-Hui Hu, the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015), is not just a technological platform but rather a metaphor for the way knowledge and information is organised and accessed, then it might be useful to rethink contemporary modes of curating as well as artistic practice. If the cloud, as Hu reminds us, is (falsely) presented as placeless and unlimited, what kind of curating is relevant for this cloud-driven overabundance of data? Can the rhetorical concept of a cloud be used in a broader way, in order to find new ways of connecting previously incompatible elements in the process of curatorial and artistic research? What kind of cartography it enables to be drawn?
When a cloud means not only a marketing slogan for data storage, but a metaphor for dealing with data in a global network, it is time to rethink its impact on curatorial practices. Bearing in mind the issue of algocurating and the fact that the notion of curating has an increasingly complex meaning in contemporary culture, the aim of this text is to focus on various curatorial approaches in recent years, ranging from a cartography of global divisions, and a transversal cartography of linked matter, to a focus on a smaller yet inspiring case study. The examples are: Taipei Biennale 2020: You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet and Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics in ZKM | Karlsruhe, 2020–2021, two exhibitions co-curated by Bruno Latour, as well as the project Geocinema (2017–2018) by Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess.
The notion of a cloud is present in all of them: in relation to data, in a hybrid structure of the form in which the curatorial concept is embodied and in cartography-inspired theory. It enables building layered narratives, as following the concept of “abstraction layers” used by Tung-Hui Hu, as a series of layers from the less abstract to the most abstract one. That is why recent curatorial theory and practice is worth rethinking from the perspective of a cloud, not only as a model for data structure, but also critically.
Ewa Wójtowicz (Poznań, Poland), PhD (dr. hab.) is a media arts researcher and art critic with a background in fine arts. She is Associate Professor on the Faculty of Art Education and Curating at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań, Poland. She is the author of books and monographies such as Through Art. Critical Observations (2021), Art in Post-Media Culture (2016), Net art (2008), with over 25 book chapters and more than 50 articles contributed to scholarly journals and books in Polish, English and other languages. She is a member of the Polish Aesthetics Society, Polish Society of Cultural Studies, Polish Society for Film and Media Studies, and AICA Poland. She is also the deputy editor-in-chief of the Zeszyty Artystyczne scholarly journal. Her research interests include: Internet art, digital culture, post-media art, curating new media and infrastructural geographies of new media.
The rest of the programme is in Croatian: https://hsaica.hr/dogadanja/medunarodna-znanstveno-strucna-i-umjetnicka-konferencija-izlozbene-kartografije/
MEĐUNARODNA ZNANSTVENO-STRUČNA I UMJETNIČKA KONFERENCIJA IZLOŽBENE KARTOGRAFIJE
Session 2 / Panel 2
Artistic Displays in Display Windows: Where Art and Life Meet
Dora Derado
The work of Želimir Koščević and in general that of the Student Centre Gallery helped form an entire generation of artists that were in the process of finding their artistic expressions in the 1960s and early 1970s. The innovations that Koščević introduced through his curatorial practice were entirely in the spirit of the era, aiming to include a wider art audience – and not just the usual gallery-goers – to the artworld in diverse ways (it may suffice to recall Dalibor Martinis’s interactive work Module N&Z or, perhaps, the Hit Parade exhibition). Besides, Koščević himself, in line with the curatorial practice of Pontus Hultén (who was a source of inspiration for Koščević), aimed to make a connection between everyday life and art (Imaginary Museum I, II and III, Postal Delivery and The Exhibition of Women and Men). Koščević’s role appears to be even larger given the fact that, during his time as the gallery’s director (from 1966–1979), he created a space for (young) artists in which they could freely express themselves and test the limits of art.
With the latter process, during the 1960s, art and everyday life were drawn ever closer, which is a process that only intensified over the following two decades. Artists that exhibited within the Student Centre Gallery also exhibited outside of its walls, be it within projects that were (co)organized by the gallery (e.g., Total Action, 1970; Gulliver in Wonderland, 1971; Bus Action, 1971) or on their own within other alternative exhibition spaces.
This work, or rather presentation, will demonstrate what the spirit of the 1970s and 1980s (which Koščević greatly helped to form) was like, based on several art projects. By and large, these projects are exhibitions and actions organized in impromptu gallery spaces, presenting a selection of artists, some of whom also directly took part in the work of the Student Centre Gallery (Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, Vladimir Dodig Trokut and Goran Trbuljak, to name a few). The focus will be on a small selection of exhibitions held in the “Show Window” Gallery (hr. Galerija Izlog) from 1974 to 1979, which was essentially a shop window of an Octagon store in Zagreb. The “Ready-Mades” exhibition series, which was held from May 18 – July 20 of 1988 in the shop window of the Znanje – August Šenoa bookstore in Zagreb will also be presented. A selection of actions performed in Ivan Tkalčić Street in Zagreb in the 1980s by Vladimir Dodig Trokut shall also be examined, most notably Sitting in a Shop Window – Museum Action (hr. Sjedenje u izlogu – muzejska akcija) which took place in the shop window of the Mladost bookstore on Flower Square in Zagreb. Finally, Edita Schubert’s exhibition entitled “My Apartment” (hr. Moj stan), which was held from March 2–9, 1999 in eleven shop windows on and around Flower Square, will also be explored.
Suffice it to say, what all these exhibitions have in common is that they were organized in shop windows – places which passers-by were used to looking at in passing, not giving too much thought to them. However, what they saw in these display windows surely was nothing like the commodities they were expecting to see. Through these and similar actions, art became integrated into everyday life and life into art.
Dora Derado received her MA in Art History from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split in 2016 where she is currently a Research Assistant. She enrolled in the Postgraduate program of Art History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in 2017 where she is currently working on her doctoral thesis Appropriation Strategies in Contemporary Art in Croatia. From 2017 to 2020, she was an associate on the “Crosculpture” research project which was under the patronage of the Croatian Science Foundation. She has been actively engaged in the field of art history since her time at university, organizing several international conferences and curating solo and group exhibitions. Her current research interests include art theory, twentieth-century art, and contemporary art, based on an interdisciplinary approach to art history.
Several Topics from the History of Curatorial Practices in Croatian Contemporary Art
Silva Kalčić
The conceptualization of the exhibition, the first conceptual exhibition in the history of contemporary art in Croatia begins with the curatorial approach of Želimir Košćević, who was curator of the SC Gallery in Zagreb (Student Centre Gallery in Zagreb, then within the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia) between 1966 and 1979. More precisely, it begins with the 1969 Exhibition of Women and Men where its visitors were the exhibits, confirming the interdisciplinary character of contemporary art. The presentation and photo documentation of the audience’s reactions were published in the gallery magazine Novina, launched as a medium of self-contextualization, but also a publication for theoretical postulates on conceptual art. The final example of a conceptual exhibition, or the phenomenon of conceptualisation of an exhibition and its layout, and also the architecture of exhibition set-up, ends with the exhibition With the Collection of artist David Maljković at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, in January 2020, as a part of the opening program for Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture. In his solo exhibition, David Maljković in fact displayed a part of the museum’s collection, stressing the point that the institution has no permanent display, but a collection archived in a storage. With his artistic intervention (or ‘gesture’, as termed by Maljković), the museum’s collection is examined nonhierarchically and nonlinearly. Museum objects have been set up at the same level, above the observer’s standard viewpoint, on a specially designed shelf that extended along the 40-metre wall of the newly opened exhibition space, in a former tobacco factory. Maljković’s exhibition included works or exhibitions of other, younger Croatian authors, such as Dora Budor who painted the façade of the museum in red, as a bright red monochrome in a line of buildings on a busy thoroughfare across the historicist Main Railway Station. Entitled narratively, There’s something terrible about reality and I don’t know what it is. No one will tell me, as a temporary art installation, it stayed there for more than two years, provoking negative comments of the non-gallery public who recognized in it, in the façade’s red colour, a communist “heraldry symbol”, a remnant of the past state’s (Yugoslavia’s) ideology.
Silva Kalčić obtained her PhD from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb. She graduated in Art History from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb (MA). She currently teaches at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split. She also works as curator, critic, editor and theorist of contemporary art, architecture and design. She is the author of the visual culture textbook entitled Art in Suspense (2005) and also the book The World toward the Labyrinth. Essays on High Modernism and Postmodernism in the 1970 and 1980 (2017).
How Curation Can Imply Narratives
James Elkins
From the British Museum to MoMA, large museums have been invested in telling stories to visitors. The “master narratives” of national and modern art have been told largely without words, by guiding viewers from one object or room to the next. In postmodern and contemporary curation, the interest has often been in undermining or erasing those narratives. In this talk I will visit several examples: the history of the hang in MoMA, the new universal Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, and attempts to steer and orient visitors to imply the presence or absence of narratives in smaller museums.
James Elkins (b. 1955) is E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His areas of interest are theories of images, non-art images (maps, schemata, heraldry, etc.), writing in art history and in the humanities, connections between science and art, historiography of art history, the relation of studio art practice and art history, representations of the body, etc. He authored such books as What Happened to Art Criticism?, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students and The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing. Lately he has focused on a non-art-related experimental writing project. His work came to prominence early on, when he wrote about the hegemony of the Western discourse in art history, the crisis of art criticism, and the wider area of cultural images, especially scientific and computer-generated images.
The Permanent Collection Exhibition and Contemporary Artists in the Museum of Arts and Crafts from 2009 to 2021
Jasmina Fučkan
In the permanent exhibition that was open to the public in 1995, the original focus was on the evidence of historical art styles and the typology of objects, with an obvious lack of additional textual explanation that would contribute to further historical contextualization or understanding of the used technologies.
Introducing the Contemporary Artists in the MUO Permanent Exhibition format in 2009 enabled such basic presentation to be enriched, setting a varied range of modes of viewing and bases for understanding.
The cycle of exhibitions Contemporary Artists in the MUO Permanent Exhibition was initiated by director Miroslav Gašparović; it started with an ambitious project by Dalibor Martinis, entitled MUORTINIS Works in the Museum! (November 12, 2009 – March 7, 2010). Martinis turned the usual roles of artist and museum-gallery system in his favour. Through about 40 interventions, he conducted a thorough conceptual revision of the museum’s aesthetic principle and opened a strong insight into the social aspect of working in the culture sector or a public institution, having challenged the elitist concept of culture.
Dubravka Rakoci’s exhibition The Premiere (November 24, 2011 – May 13, 2012) dealt with the relationship between arts and crafts, reflecting the institution’s name. Her objects, entitled Spatial Drawings discreetly activated the latent and vague tension between contemplation and the exhibits’ functional purpose.
Željko Badurina in his exhibition Insider (November 27, 2012 – March 30, 2013) made 58 different kinds of interventions in the format of digital collages, audio works and ready-made installations across the museum exhibition. Along with all the interventions, Badurina introduced contents and subjects that usually intrigue him, such as entangling visual codes of popular cultures with artistic styles, playing with the boundaries of kitsch, emphasizing the banality of marketing rhetoric and introducing a regime of market valorisations of museum objects.
In the exhibition Citius, altius, fortius (December 10, 2013 – April 13, 2014), Slaven Tolj set to provoke power games between the public good and the problematic privatization efforts that have dominated a corrupt society such as ours. He did this by staging a set for a golf tournament all across the museum and its artefacts. The choice of subject originated from the artist’s participation in the civic opposition to investment plans to construct a golf course on Srđ, a hill overlooking Dubrovnik.
Following biomimetic ideas and inspired by cultures of the East Asia, Ida Blažičko in her exhibition Topology of Infinity (January 30 – August 20, 2015) established a new organic dialectic between architecture, museum objects and visitors. In order to create poetic elements of a spatial-psychological image, haiku verses by poets Matsu Bashô and Shohaku were used instead of the usual museum captions.
With the concept of her exhibition entitled At Home (November 5, 2015 – February 28, 2016), Nika Radić lay the groundwork for exploring various aspects of the theme of everyday life that museum collections seek to represent. Through her interventions, she broke the boundaries of museum objects from the system of life-functions and expanded the tight and isolating framework of the museum world.
Božica Dea Matasić in her exhibition IN-Version (January 24 – April 2, 2017) applied VR technology in a critical way, in order to create disrupted virtual images of exhibition rooms. This method was meant to encourage visitors’ perceptual interest in tangible characteristics of exhibited objects and emphasize the spectator’s insight into their design qualities.
The exhibition by Zagreb-based Japanese artist, Akiko Sato, entitled Draw Attention / Exhibition for Drawing (January 16 – March 31, 2018) was a kind of work in progress. Within the museum exhibition envisioned as an art studio, Akiko created a series of ambient drawings which formed new relations among museum objects, inviting visitors to an imaginative game of vivid dynamics of associations.
Conceptual artist Goran Trbuljak’s exhibition, entitled Why Would Someone Buy a Bach Wash Sink from Goran Trbuljak? (November 20, 2018 – April 1, 2019), expressed in a witty and serious way the author’s view on the issue of artist identity and the idea of authenticity of artistic work by raising many questions about the art market, private collectors and institutional valorisation of art.
Marina Bauer’s exhibition Delving (December 17, 2019 – March 22, 2020), presented a hybrid, tactile or an interactive object, expressing her reaction to the basic museum discomfort – the ban on touching the objects.
The last in the series was Top Dog / Underdog (December 5, 2020 – February 17, 2021), the exhibition by Paulina Jazvić. It presented a single installation as an emotional reaction to the museum damaged by earthquake. The permanent MUO exhibition was closed, the staircase leading to the first floor was blocked, access disabled, and the previous concept of the exhibition had to be reconfigured due to these circumstances.
Side programmes held as part of the cycle Contemporary Artists at the MUO Permanent Exhibition, such as meetings with artists, guided tours and workshops for children, further contributed to the activation a reflective space “in between” the objects and visitors. The specific variety of different voices and personal methodologies of those exhibitions during the ten-year period have demonstrated the inexhaustible potential of this project. Thanks to the interventions of contemporary artists, the autonomous approach of the original exhibition, complemented by strategies of appropriations, new visions and narratives, with more or less direct critical comments, from the point of view of audience proved to be an intriguing and updated experience of encountering museum material.
Jasmina Fučkan is the curator of the Contemporary Artists in the Permanent Exhibition of the Museum of Arts and Crafts program. She graduated in Art History and Comparative Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.
At the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, she is the Head of Sculpture and Ivory Collections. Previously, in the role of exhibition curator, she collaborated on numerous exhibition, publishing and education projects.
As a curator, co-author or author, she participated in the organization of exhibitions from the museum’s collection, as well as solo exhibitions by contemporary artists.
She is the author of the monograph Svjetlan Junaković / crteži iz blokova 2011–2021. (Sandorf, 2022). She writes reviews of contemporary performance art for Plesnascena.hr. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts – ULUPUH/Study section.
On the Specifics of the Phenomenon of Curatorial Practices in the Context of the Osijek POPUP Project (2012–2017)
Igor Loinjak
The phenomenon of curatorial practices has represented an ongoing and vital aspect in the approach to the presentation of contemporary art production for some time now. The genesis of curatorial practices can be traced more intensively since the 1960s and early 1970s, but approaches that have motivated and guided young curators and entire collectives and artists have changed not only because of the context of the time but also due to socioeconomic circumstances of individual countries. On the other hand, some other segments that shape the cultural and artistic reality of a particular space should not be neglected, as this is the environment in which individual actions and projects are organized. In the following text, I will focus on the POPUP project launched in Osijek in 2012, which due to the way the project members approached the exhibition’s organization and the creation of a different and fresher artistic climate in the city, is undoubtedly relevant in the context of contemporary (non-institutional) curatorial practices in Croatia.
The starting point of the POPUP project is based on the idea of creating an alternative exhibition platform in the city of Osijek, in which the development of the Academy of Arts and Culture with new young artists and students pointed to the need to find new exhibition spaces for young artists. The project participants’ main idea and goal was to expand exhibition opportunities and boundaries encountered by contemporary artists in Osijek, where the concept of alternative culture is only a vivid memory of the 1980s when there was a solid base within the Student Center in Osijek. With its help, numerous cultural events were regularly organized that eluded the mainstream cultural domain. The model chosen within POPUP is based on the form of short small-scale exhibition projects and referred to the organization of exhibitions of contemporary art practice that in a way “pop out” of the usual institutional framework and seek to overcome the common understanding of art and modernity. The name of the project suggests that it is a non-permanent structure that, uncontrollably popping up like advertising space on websites, is ruthlessly imposed on the recipient. On the other hand, the social dimension was also important because the goal of the project was the cultural revival of many unused spaces in the city center which, thanks to occasional art actions and exhibitions, became a meeting place for many actors in the art world. This mode of operation enables the avoidance of often impermeable and sluggish gallery and museum patterns, and short-term – one-day or two-day exhibitions – are designed according to the specific requirements of the exhibited material and in accordance with the space available at the time. Through the POPUP project, it was important not only to present works of art, but also to indirectly ask about the justification and purpose of their existence. Acting within the project, members of the POPUP collective not only tried to indoctrinate the audience but also tried to explain to themselves what makes a particular exhibition specific that it usually goes beyond the institutional framework of the city of Osijek and beyond.
During the five-year project (2012–2017), members of the POPUP collective managed to contribute to the redefinition of the local, a somewhat rigid and stagnant paradigm in the approach and understanding of contemporary art practice. This does not only mean qualitative progress, but also opening up space for experiment and research. Independence from institutions and, in a sense, its guerrilla position enabled POPUP members not to design exhibition projects according to the “verified values” model, but to incorporate a certain dose of risk into each of them, a risk that is yet to be demonstrated without a strictly defined elaboration of value. As a result of such constant searching, reviewing and reflection, an open and flexible approach was formed in POPUP in which there was no insistence on giving the final answers and establishing concrete and predetermined values. Accordingly, the role of the curatorial and artistic collective was in the zealous and selfless effort to constantly reinterpret and re-contextualize some aspects of contemporary art practice along the way.
The aim of this presentation is to introduce the basic methodological settings of curatorial work inherited from institutional critique that were practiced in the context of POPUP exhibitions and show their similarities and differences compared to the established institutional patterns that operate within museum and gallery systems.
Igor Loinjak (b. 1988) is an art historian and art critic. He enrolled in the study of philosophy and religious sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Society of Jesus in Zagreb, Croatia, where he obtained a B.A. in philosophy in 2010, and two years later an M.A. in comparative literature and art history from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Since 2015, he has worked at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek. He regularly writes art reviews for daily newspapers and art magazines. He has authored several exhibitions and written a number of editorials and introductions to exhibition catalogues. Igor Loinjak is a secretary of AICA Croatia and InSEA Croatia. Main articles: The Value of a Literary Work and Issues with Shaping the Literary Canon; About Dulčić’s formal simplifications; Art in the Service of Generating Surplus Value – On the Work of Art as a (Specific) Form of Capital; Did Surrealism Spring from Psychoanalysis; Institutions of Art Criticism Today; Evaluation and (mis)understanding. The rules of art criticism in promoting new art; About some modalities of abstract visual language in Croatian painting.
A Society Without Art: Curatorial Work of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos
Jasna Jakšić
The talk will present the curatorial practice of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos at the Zagreb City Galleries and the Gallery of Contemporary Art between 1958 and 1982. Bašičević, a renowned art critic, artist and founder of the Centre for Film, Photography and Television, spent his nearly entire career at the Zagreb City Galleries. One of the first exhibitions he organised was that of Sava Šumanović, a painter whose oeuvre was the subject of Bašičević’s doctoral dissertation.
In the 1960s, he very actively promoted naïve art, albeit by departing from the strictly set role assigned to naïve art in cultural diplomacy, thus sparking great controversy and debates. He worked with the Gorgona Group, while at the same time preparing exhibitions of the New Tendencies at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, having written one of the anthological texts for the exhibition catalogue of New Tendency 3. Furthermore, he curated the exhibition De consequenties van de machine: Dertien Joegoslavische kunstenaars at the Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
From 1973 onwards, he managed the Centre for Film, Photography and Television; as part of its programme he produced exhibitions by Željko Jerman, the Group of Six Artists and Petar Dabac, and promoted photography as an artistic medium through exhibitions of New Photography. He was on the editorial board of Spot, a magazine for new photography.
In 1976, as part of the Centre for Film, Photography and Television programme, he organised a complex and innovative exhibition entitled Confrontations, where – alongside works from the Zagreb City Galleries, including the Benko Horvat Collection – he presented works of the youngest generation of artists as reproductions, both recent ones or the ones made for that occasion. The available documentation on Bašičević’s curatorial practice – which also included early photography and museology alongside contemporary art, new media practices and photography – reveals his critical attitude toward the dominant paradigms of art of the period, as well as toward individual exhibitions and exhibition practices. Furthermore, he also used partial institutionalisation of experimental practices as a space of critical reflection on them. Ultimately, the presentation will seek to establish parallels between Bašičević’s curatorial and artistic practice through the prism of self-reflexivity and scepticism.
Jasna Jakšić is a curator and an art critic based in Zagreb, Croatia. She graduated in Art History and Italian Language and Literature, as well as Library Science from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (MSU) since 2004, where she manages the Library and the Documentation and Information Department. She curated numerous exhibitions and coordinated international collaboration projects, such as Digitizing Ideas (2010–2012) www.digitizing-ideas.org and Performing the Museum (2014–2016). In her curatorial work, she focuses on the presentation, accessibility and mediation of artist’s books and magazines, visual poetry and archival documents, and the borderline between artwork and artistic documentation. Since 2007, she has been working on the digitization of MSU publications and archival collections.
The rest of the programme is in Croatian: https://hsaica.hr/dogadanja/medunarodna-znanstveno-strucna-i-umjetnicka-konferencija-izlozbene-kartografije/