THE 54TH ZAGREB SALON OF VISUAL ARTS
WITHOUT ANESTHESIA
Home of HDLU
March 26 – May 5, 2019

the 54th ZAGREB SALON – WITHOUT ANESTHESIA, according to the curatorial concept of Branka Benčić and Tevž Logar, will be opened on Tuesday, March 26, 2019, at 7pm at the Home of HDLU, Trg žrtava fašizma 16. The exhibition will remain open until May 5, 2019.

CONCEPT:

The proposal of the curator concept of the 54th Zagreb Salon starts with several assumptions and interests, which it tries to gather within an exhibition that is formed as an existing and recognizable salon format, with the intention of presenting recent artistic production and considering the contexts in which artists work. Considering the background and perspective of the Zagreb Salon the curatorial proposal is formed kaleidoscopically, as a reflection of multiple perspectives and positions. On the one hand, with a twenty-year break, we recall the City scapes (1998) Salon, curated by Igor Zabela, on which this exhibition leans, contemplating continuities and discontinuities, opportunities and perspectives, filled and unfulfilled potentials and aspirations, curatorial practices and institutional history of the exhibition. In the light of Igor Zabela’s thinking about the exhibition as a strategy, the exhibition is a global idea, a significant row of procedures and approaches to ensure that the right viewer sees artwork in the right way. Speaking about this, also the exhibition project Without Anesthesia, which in its internal logic does not address the general problems of presentation, already contemplates the relationships that arise between works of art, institutions and the public.

(…) Formally, the exhibition is developing on the one hand as a generational project, gathering works by mostly Croatian artists who are positioned in a dialogue with generationally close artists from the cultural space of the former SFRY and the international context, finding loose or distant connections and relationships. The Salon thus reflects the tradition of Zagreb as a place that has been included in the international context since the 1960s as a meeting place for artists, critics and institutions. This is the idea that has been inscribed into today´s curatorial practices. The exhibition aims to explore and gather art practices that focus on opportunities, breaks, transformations, failures, and insecurities in relation to contemporary cultural practices in the social and institutional context. Certain metanarratives evolve as a reflection on the format of the exhibition itself, its context, as an attempt to reposition the Zagreb Salon, and it is discursively thought through both through exhibition and the conversations within the side program.

(…) Thought as a space without sharp edges, the 54th Zagreb Salon entitled Without Anesthesia, focuses on the social conditioning of aesthetic and conceptual assumptions, the motivation of the artist. The exhibition explores tensions and fractures within dominant and invisible narratives, questions of uncertainty, tensions or collapses, of space and time, as a places of inscriptions of  fractures or potentials. The exhibition and series of events in the side program do not want to be another manifestation “frozen in time”, but wants to show the possibility of constant development within the system of contemporary art, which unconditionally needs to establish a relation to social facts.

(…) In order to articulate some of the formed places of interest, we accepted dialogue as a methodology, deciding on collaborative curatorial work as a dialogue, leaning our dialogue on the multitude of artistic positions.

Branka Benčić and Tevž Logar

ARTISTS:

Marija Ančić, Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak, Ben Cain, Jasmina Cibic, Nemanja Cvijanović, Karla Čurčinski, Matija Debeljuh, Igor Eškinja, Fokus Grupa, Martina Grlić, Igor Grubić, Tina Gverović, Siniša Ilić, Paulina Jazvić, Jelena Jureša, Petar Katavić, Kristina Marić, Ines Matijević, Damir Očko, Petra Orbanić, Jelena Petric, Renata Poljak, Viktor Popović, Jasenko Rasol, Lala Raščić, Davor Sanvincenti, Marko Tadić, Nora Turato, Katarina Zdjelar.

Side program coming soon!

Within the 54th Zagreb Salon in the Expanded Media Gallery (PM) the Exhibition of Awarded Authors of the 51st Zagreb Salon: Goran Škofić and Vlasta Žanić – From the Other Side, will be opened. According to the decision of the Award jury both Goran Škofić, for the work On the beach and Vlasta Žanić, for the work Right to vote, won two equal Grand Prix prizes of the 51st Zagreb Salon.

TICKETS:

20 kn citizens
10 kn students and retirees
10 kn groups (over 5 persons, fare per person)

Free for regular members of Croatian Association of Artists, AICA, ICOM, Croatian Society of Art Historians and Croatian Journalists’ Association, as well as students of the Academy of Fine Arts and Art History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, upon presentation of valid documents.
Tickets are sold at the Croatian Association of Artists box office, during the opening hours of the exhibition.