KÜNSTLERHAUS WIEN
“On stage: narrative and performance in contemporary Croatian video”
“The Other Reality: Croatian emerging painters”

17 NOV  – 4 DEC 2011
opening on Thursday, 17th NOV 2011 at 7pm

Künstlerhaus, Karlsplatz 5, A – 1010 Wien

On stage: narrative and performance in contemporary Croatian video

The selection is focused on some of the most recent works of the Croatian artists, members of the Croatian Association of Artists in Zagreb, that have been active, both on national and international level, since 2000. Their latest production, in accordance with personal interests and researches already present in previous works, in different ways refers to the notions of narrative, fiction, storytelling, history and performance in the medium of film and video.

Damir Očko‘s  video „The Moon Shall Never Take My Voice: three songs for muted voice and various sounds” stages solo performance of deaf women in three acts: fictional and historical narrative is a starting point for the extraordinary interpretation that translates voice in visual, distorted sign language, and mediates sound through acoustic elements of corporeal expression.

Ana Hušman‘s „Football” as a historical starting point has a football match in Mexico City in 1986 and legendary score of Diego Maradona given by his hand. The re-enactment of the play is done though testimonies, followed with an artists attempt to transfer the boys game into sound, i.e. to reinterpret it in a manner of sport radio journalism, uncommonly performed by female voice.

„Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs” by Renata Poljak deals with ideological constructs of past and present, personified in the figure of a movie character, based on a real person, partisan boy Boško Buha, who fought in WW II. The character figured as an imposed role model for children growing up in Yugoslavia after the appearance of the movie in 1979. Twelve years later, the actor for whom it was the only role, faced the real war, where he fought against the Yugoslav army. An interview with him presents 2 opposed ideological constructions and views on war and 20 years of Croatia’s independence.

Dystopian travel in near future is narrated in Lala Raščić‘s storytelling video performance „The Damned Dam”. The plot, based on some real events, like the total panic that a radio drama caused in the Bosnian town of Lukavac in 2000, and on its fictional consequences, is told and performed with reminiscence of traditional epic poetry in Bosnia. But forget folklore, since the artists interpretation transforms traditional images and language into fantastic world of „heroes and fairs, love and dystopia, rivers and lakes, damns and factories, BiH and EU” evoked and told in the beautiful scenery of Lukavac, where it all began.

 Jasna Jakšić

The Other Reality: Croatian emerging painters

This generation of Croatian artists gave us a reason to start talking about painting again. They present their thoughts in a playful way, often supported by theoretical backgrounds, and hiding deeper and more complex meaning than it could be grasped at the first sight. While older generations focused their interests mostly on abstraction, both in motives of the paintings and motives for painting, today’s emerging painters play with the figuration and possibilities that allow them to create different worlds. 

The idea of showing the hidden or neglected queer history in order to put the present and the future in the rightful context is the focus of Helena Janecic‘s works. In this series she paints women living in the rural conservative surroundings and doing everyday housework while being happily involved in a lesbian relationship. In a witty and engaging manner, Helena speaks about the life in a village and links it with a personal fantasy thus creating the connection between the fictional and the real world.
Dino Zrnec deals with the idea of the past more directly, reminding of the socialist era by posing in front projections showing old socialist factories; he paints the scenes in the airily, almost transparent manner to stress out the absence of one’s personal memory of such places. Nonetheless, his autobiographical approach, both in portraying himself and by sharing his personal memories, is more an adventure than seriously engaged political work.
As well as Dino, Mirna Kutlesa paints with an unusual lightness using a whole spectre of symbols in her paintings. Emphasizing that the world is a wildness which should be discovered and tamed, by putting the people in the wild she discovers her own way to show us the long forgotten but newly rediscovered human freedom.
Both Ivona Juric and Martina Grlic have a quiet introspective approach to painting. While in Ivona’s paintings that insight is amplified with the cycle called “A minute of silence in a day” where she paints trees and plants, the symbols of ever existing life, Martina paints scenes from everyday life happening during the moment of the detonation of an atomic bomb. And just as we are unaware of the quiet life that pulsates in plants, we are unaware of an explosion that sweeps the whole life leaving all in the misty dust.
Sebastijan Dracic thoughtfully uses various elements to create the specific atmosphere of a certain space, would it be interior or exterior, and often plays with the feeling of absence within the painting. This time, Sebastijan presents the old stories and human believes about the end of the world. By painting trees in a forest he actually talks about the life cycle, about the trees that regenerate, lost from sight in the group of many. Both him and Rene Bachrach Kristofic use literature, films, and music to conduct ideas from an abstract thought into a final work. Rene also deals with The End, looking on it from a very personal perspective. Almost sketch alike, he uses the different formats to create the polyptychs, and gives the viewer a choice, almost like a story with multiple endings, to navigate the work in its own way.
At first sight, Pavle Pavlovic uses fun and an easy-going approach to painting, playing with human figures and elements, which tell us some long-forgotten story or set us back to childhood. In spite of it, his painting approach is all but superficial; the concentration and the precision he uses to build those compositions give a touch of the real, making us believe that the story could be personally ours.

Maja Rozman