Category: Exhibitions
05 September 2023
BARRY WOLFRYD
Spectacularizing the Margin: Interwoven Worlds of Barry Wolfryd
PM Gallery, Home of HDLU (Meštrović pavilion)
September 14-October 8, 2023
Opening of the exhibition Spectacularizing the Margin: Interwoven Worlds of Barry Wolfryd by BARRY WOLFRYD will be on Thursday, September 14, 2023 at 7pm, at PM Gallery (Home of HDLU / Meštrović pavilion).
“Within Barry Wolfryd’s artistic oeuvre, two constant and recurring threads are present, intertwined with the cultural constructs that have shaped him. One is linked to Wolfryd’s native country, the United States of America, and the other to Mexico and the city where he has lived and created since 1985, Mexico City. Wolfryd was born in Los Angeles and began his formal art education at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Upon moving to Mexico in 1975, he continued his education at various esteemed higher education institutions in Mexico and the USA. During our conversation, he pointed out several times that he has been asked around the world, “How did you come to Mexico?” to which he would simply respond, “Well, in a VW bus “. This very response from Wolfryd embodies the dichotomy of his artistic poetics: the American simplicity and openness (such as living a nomadic life from the time of Jack Kerouac to the movie Nomadland)[1] and the Mexican inclination towards mystification, the supernatural, and the fateful (materialised in Mexican culture through iconic celebrations of the Day of the Dead and the works of Leonora Carrington). These two threads, American and Mexican, alternate and complement each other in Wolfryd’s artistic oeuvre, both in painting and sculpture, thus creating a unique poetics. (…)
In the Expanded Media Gallery [Galerija Proširenih medija], Barry Wolfryd presents a series of works related to his current exhibition at the Arocena Museum, Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico titled Fragility of The Absurd (2023), featuring new sculptures created in the Murano technique. According to Wolfryd’s statement, in these works, he re-examines War as a certain cliché, that is, the representation of War in the media space where it is treated as an ordinary part of everyday life, much like going grocery shopping or doing other routine activities. However, in his artistic strategy, Wolfryd takes it a step further in these works, both ironizing and simultaneously spectacularizing two traditional arts or artistic techniques. These techniques have been commodified due to the influx of tourism in Venice and Mexico, transforming them not only into kitsch but also marginalizing their cultural significance. The first technique is, of course, the Murano technique of crafting glass objects in workshops on the Venetian island of Murano (from the 13th century to the present day). The second is that of Mexican dioramas, known as Nicho art, a form of folk art found in Central and South American countries. In Nicho art, small figurines made from various materials are placed within glass boxes (miniature altars). (…)
(…) With his Fragility of The Absurd series, Barry Wolfryd employs irony and direct criticism of the current era’s superficiality and hopelessness, raising questions about the interplay of cultural layers, marginal phenomena, and liminal spaces. Simultaneously, he explores the reinterpretation of two grand cultures: the Mexican – traditional and folkloric and the American – both the invisible everyday culture and the overly visible spectacular one.”
Josip Zanki
[1] The fascination with the American road and travel is present in Kerouac’s novel On the Road published in 1957, as well as in Chloé Zao’s movie Nomadland from 2021.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Barry Wolfryd was born in Los Angeles, California, but he has carried out most of his artistic career in Mexico, where he has lived for more than 45 years. Wolfryd began his artistic studies in 1972 at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. At age 22, he moved to Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, where he continued his studies at the University of the Americas, and from 1975 to 1979, at the Allende Institute in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. In 1982, he studied at the Chicago Art Institute (student-at-large) and in 1984, at the National Institute of the Arts in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. In 1985, he settled in Mexico City, where he lives and maintains his studio.
Wolfryd’s work encompasses painting, mixed media, sculpture in ceramics, bronze and glass, object art, and graphics. He focuses on the use of iconography and popular imagery as a vehicle for criticism. Since 1985, he has held more than 40 individual exhibitions and participated in more than 120 group presentations. Among them, are exhibitions in relevant museums, institutions, and galleries in various countries.
WORKING HOURS:
Tuesday-Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Mondays and holidays closed
The exhibition will be opened until October 8, 2023
24 August 2023
Opening: Prsten Gallery (Home of HDLU), Friday, September 1, 2023 at 8pm
The ALU Perspective is a project conceived as an additional format and expansion of the Final Exhibition at the ALU Zagreb. It is held at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Zagreb every year in the context of celebrating the Academy Day (June 8), with the desire to reminiscence the day of the founding of the first art academy in Croatia back in 1907, but also to present the final artworks of students of all 6 departments of the Academy and, in all years of undergraduate and graduate studies.
The goal of the September edition of the project entitled ALU Perspective 2023/The best of is to present the best student works from the production of works created during the academic year 2022/2023, while raising awareness of the importance of artistic creativity and the presence of works in different forms and approaches to artistic creativity.
With regard to the relocation and renovation of ALU Zagreb, which we hope will contribute to the creation of a new format of higher art education in the Republic of Croatia, we believe that maintaining and presenting a project such as ALU Perspective creates a good accumulation of energy for strengthening artistic creativity, encouraging top production and changing society through artistic creativity.
The future development of the project and its subsequent editions will thus open up a new space for constant creative change in all generations of artists with encouragement and special promotion of the emerging generation.
The working hours of the exhibition at HDLU:
Tuesday-Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Mondays and holidays closed
Planet, People, Care-It Spells Degrowth! / Planet, ljudi, skrb – to se zove odrast!
Marwa Arsanios, Željko Beljan, Marina Naprushkina, Rupali Patil, Dan Perjovschi, Selma Selman, Marko Tadić, Cecilia Vicuña
Opening: Bačva Gallery, September 1st 2023
Opening program
6 pm Book launch Françoise Vergès: A Decolonial Feminism, Multimedijalni institut, 2023
8 pm Exhibition opening
Exhibition open until Sept 10th 2023
Curated by: Ana Dević/WHW
In collaboration with: The Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), Zagreb
Produced by WHW: Ana Kovačić, Gordana Borić, Sara Mikelić
Exhibition design: Marko Tadić
Technical support and set up: Marin Kovačević, Vedran Grladinović
After Paris, Budapest, Venice and Barcelona the 9th International Conference on Degrowth will be held in Zagreb from August 29 to September 2, 2023.
Bearing the same title as the conference Planet, People, Care-It Spells Degrowth!, the exhibition is conceived in a conjugation and in a dialogue with the 9th International Degrowth conference in Zagreb. The focus of the exhibition is on potentialities of socio-metabolic transformation our societies need to undertake to return to their fairshare within planetary boundaries and maintain emancipation and solidarity for all in their population.
The exhibition rethinks eco-social artistic practices from the perspective of political ecologies, eco-feminist and decolonial standpoints exploring how artistic agency and imagination can contribute to transformation of the unjust, extractivist logic of neoliberal order. Artists included in the exhibition are preoccupied with reconfiguring new subjectivities through reimagining commons, reusing, repurposing, agitating and sharing as well as igniting new imaginaries through collective desire, joy and solidarity.
The organizational team of the conference includes Zagreb based organizations active in the fields of science, ecology, research, activism and visual culture: IPE – Institute for Political Ecology, DOOR – Society for Designing Sustainable Development, Multimedia Institute (MaMa), Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Scientists for Climate and What how and for whom/WHW. The conference is bringing together researchers, activists and cultural workers in a post-pandemic, post-quake, municipalist green transition city reinventing itself for a safer and kinder, even if precarious and climate-constrained century. 9th International conference is realized in partnership with the City of Zagreb and its institutions. In addition to the scientific conference, which will bring together over 500 participants: scientists, activists, theorists, researchers and cultural figures from all over the world.
Some of the keynote speakers include Kohei Saito, Françoise Vergès, Roland Nkwain, Karin Doolan, Ngam, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Paul Stubbs and rich conference program. that includes numerous participants.
The accompanying program of the Degrowth Week Festival offers the Zagreb audience a series of free cultural-artistic, discursive and activist activities: environmental film program, exhibition, performances and lectures…
Here you can check: Preliminary conference program, for the afternoon sessions entrance free of charge!
WHW activities within the conference at the Zagreb trade fair:
31/8, 3 pm Françoise Vergès: Breathing: A Revolutionary Act, Zagreb Fair
- 30 pm Marwa Arsanios, farid rakun/ruangrupa: Artistic Ecologies Reimagining the Commons, Moderator: Pablo Martínez
WHW activities are is realized in conjunction with the two-year collaborative project Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances in collaboration with the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam and Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit.
The working hours of the exhibition at HDLU:
Tuesday-Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Mondays and holidays closed
WHW program supported by:
City Office for Culture, Intercity and International Relations, and Civil Society
Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
Croatian Audiovisual Centre-HAVC
Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Foundation Kultura nova
Kontakt Collection/ERSTE Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Government of the Republic of Croatia, Office for Associations
Danče Beach/ Foto: Olaf Nicolai
From June 1 to August 27, Meštrović Pavilion takes you to Dubrovnik. The ground plan topography on the black floor of the Bačva Gallery by the German artist Olaf Nicolai and the experimental vertical objects of vivid colors by the Dubrovnik sculptor Mariana Pende evoke one of the last refuges of the local Dubrovnik population – Danče Beach – a meeting place of generations and summer outdoor life. The Bačva Gallery thus becomes a “beach” – a place of escape and rest during the entire Zagreb summer.
We open the exhibition on June 1st with the musical performance What Happens When We Communicate, by Anna Ghallo (Vocal) and Saša Nestorović (Saxophone), who join the fabric of reality with sound, finding unique harmonic frequencies. The evening will be spiced up by Aleksandra Skwarc aka DJ Bonnie, music maestro, successful DJ, curator, and agency owner, who comes to us from Berlin. Refreshments will be provided by the Botaničar bar.
During the whole time of the exhibition, the rich side program has the widest audience in mind.
Dragana Yogini will take care of driving away the fatigue and tension of busy everyday life and finding balance on a physical, emotional, and mental level. Evening Yoga Flow and Morning Meditations are the ideal places to strengthen your vital energy and calm your mind. The program and occasional refreshments are enabled by Cedevita vitaminska voda, and so that you don’t have to think about your own, Flexity took care of the equipment.
For issues of raising awareness of the importance of preserving the planet Earth for future generations, in cooperation with Smješko Theatre, we have prepared for you the ECO educational play Blue Planet, which educates preschool children and children of lower grades interestingly and entertainingly about the topics of preserving the sea, rivers, lakes and the environment in general.
Ensemble Synchronos – an international ensemble that brings together artists from Croatia, Austria, France, and the USA, for this occasion, designed a Luxuzna Sonata in 3 movements – concerts, which consist of musical material that is sonically and subconsciously based on the themes of the exhibition – through used instruments and non-instruments or recycled objects; natural elements such as water and air, light; or through the articulation of the different personalities of the performers and the musical material itself.
The Fraktura Bookstore took care of the pleasant moments of relaxed reading on the “beach” of the Bačva gallery, bringing their titles, which visitors can read in this unusual setting. They will also be able to participate in the Silent Reading program, where the authors themselves will read excerpts from their books.
In addition to all of the above, we should also mention the Confectionery Dubai performance, by Antun Sekulić, who talks about the important topic of the impossibility of employing young people in the profession they are studying for, which is why they are forced to work in service industries – most often seasonal jobs in tourism.
For all the details about the exhibition, accompanying programs, and registration methods, visit the website: dancedeluxe.hdlu.hr
MARTINA MIHOLIĆ
GALLERY OF FLOATING ARCHIPELAGOS
Karas Gallery
23.5.-13.6.2023.
On Tuesday, 23.5.2023. Martina Miholić opens her solo exhibition entitled Gallery of Floating Archipelagos, at 7 pm in Karas Gallery (Ulica kralja Zvonimira 58).
In her foreword, Barbara Vujanović emphasizes:
One of the narrative backbones of the series of works, which, however, is not literally staged in the exhibitions, is Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale “The Little Mermaid“. The story of a tragic character who sacrifices her greatest virtue, her voice, and then her body, and even her existence, is an ideal reference to the contemporary imperative of constant adaptation of female appearance to the imposed canons of beauty. The body changed by cosmetics, surgery and exercise continues its further transformation in the digital and viral reality, which perpetuates further imperatives of artificial and unnecessary ideals.
Biography:
Martina Miholić graduated from the Graphic Arts Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2004, and in 2011 she received her master’s degree from Central Saint Martins College in London. In 2006, she became the artistic director of the International Festival of Student Theatre and Multimedia – Test! which she managed until 2010. From 2010 until 2012, as part of the ULAZ association and in collaboration with the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in London, she implemented the project „Export – Import”. In 2016, together with Mia Orsag, she was the curator of the 33rd Youth Salon. She has produced numerous cultural events, such as the Youth Salon, Biennale of Painting, and others. Since 2021, she has been a member of the Cultural Council of Innovative Cultural Practices at the Ministry of Culture.
She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, as well as film festivals in the country and abroad. She has attended several residency programmes and is the recipient of an award at the 14th Triennial of Croatian Sculpture.
The exhibition will be open during the period from 23.5. to 13.6.2023.
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The Karas Art Hub platform was designed for the purpose of developing different approaches to the presentation, experience and processing of works of art displayed to the public in Zagreb’s Karas Gallery, which are presented to the public with digital content on the gallery’s web platform, including 360° shots of installations and video miniatures.
Organizer: HDLU
With the support of: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb
Meštrović Pavilion, the Home of Croatian Fine Artists, will open its doors on June 1, 2023, for the Dance de Luxe exhibition, which will turn the Bačva gallery into a “beach” – Zagreb’s refuge from the summer heat, offering a program for all ages.
Internationally recognized Olaf Nicolai (DE) and Dubrovnik artist Mariana Pende (HR) exhibit a collaborative site-specific installation – built especially and only for the Meštrović Pavilion in Zagreb.
Dance de Luxe refers to Danče beach, the only beach in the center of the well-known tourist mecca of Dubrovnik, which, due to its slightly hidden location, known only to local citizens and their closest friends, has remained outside the huge tourist frenzy that characterizes Dubrovnik in the summer. Branko Franceschi, the curator of the exhibition, says that over the years “Danče has become a kind of center for the locals, where generations of citizens hang out and exchange the latest gossip or the verbal history of their town. It is the place where you make or break lifelong friendships, meet or lose your lovers, or simply enjoy life with your family and relatives. Collaborative art project Dance de Lux, mimicking hedonism of the infamous disco era in its title, celebrates Danče’s outdoor social lifestyle and intends to recreate it in the interior of the Bačva Gallery, the most spectacular exhibition space in downtown Zagreb.”
As noted by artist Olaf Nicolai: ” Designed by Ivan Meštrović (1883 -1962) and inaugurated in 1938, the Pavilion is not only an architecturally imposing building – it is also an urbanist statement. It is one of those architectures that create places that cannot be passed through unnoticed – everything is a creative setting that assigns things and people their spots. In his miniatures on urban features from the period in which Meštrović Pavilion was created, the German cultural historian Siegfried Kracauer noted a second, more informal architecture alongside this architecture of planned setting. He speaks of places that come into being slowly through the most diverse undertakings, that change again and again, transforming themselves – and thus resemble rather living landscapes. One such place is one of the oldest bathing beaches in Dubrovnik, Danče, after which a small republic was named.
On his part, Nicolai interprets and translates the complex and organically developed topography of Danče beach for which he says that whoever visits it finds themselves in an area that looks like a large playground made of stone, with a variety of small buildings of variable functions that have been spontaneously created and still seem to be changing. In the exhibition, this informal place meets Meštrović’s monumental pavilion, becoming its guest and a kind of “body snatcher”.
However, the structures and built palimpsests of Danče are not simply transferred to the pavilion. Rather, visitors enter an architectural “blueprint” on and in which they can walk: a plan for the unplanned, a paradox. They encounter both sculptural elements and drawings that are proposals for possible buildings. The space of the pavilion is crossed with another architectural experience and transforms into a place of the imagination of its visitors.
Pende is on the other hand, further developing her experimentations with materials such as graphite, textile, Plexiglas in vivid colours, chromed metal, and, for this occasion, dried sea sponges, creating vertical elements. In fact, her objects of various sizes, shapes, colours, materials, and their combinations, represent temporary structures that are seasonally and daily built by Danče’s concessioners and beachgoers. Exploring usage of the everyday materials in the production of her sculptures and thus contributing continuation of the neo-avant-guard aesthetics, Mariana Pende opens a completely new reference to the local community’s economy when she recycles graphite remnants taken from a once successful TUP factory, transforming material into a fabric made of a completely new, at the same time, artificial and organic material. This recently closed graphite factory was the last active industrial facility in Dubrovnik. Its closure left the city completely dependent on tourism income.
“Dance de Luxe installation continues the history of artist’s made community-minded spaces intended to enrich alienated lives of city dwellers, such as Karin Schneider’s Pomerio Vernicular Children Playground produced in 2008 in Rijeka, Marko Pogačnik litopuncture stone circle on the lake Jarun in Zagreb, or Milena Lah’s monumental marble stairs entitled Poetic Spaces providing scenography for poetry recitals in Maksimir Park since 1981, also in Zagreb. Dance de Luxe, alongside its main programming, thus gives a new life and sense of purpose to already existing public installations created by the previous generations of artists.” – as said by Branko Franceschi, curator of the exhibition and director of the National Museum of Modern Art, partner of the exhibition, on the occasion of the exhibition announcement.
All the information about the exhibition and side program can be found on the exhibition website: dancedeluxe.hr
The exhibition is open from June 1 until August 27 in the Bačva Gallery of the Meštrović pavilion.
09 May 2023
LEA VIDAKOVIĆ
Family Portrait
Prsten Gallery
May 17 – June 11, 2023
Exhibition opening: May 17, 2023 at 7 pm in PM Gallery
The exhibition is included in the program of Animafest (June 5 – June 10)
Internationally acclaimed visual artist and animator Lea Vidaković has created her work Family Portrait in two ways in terms of presentation. In the first case, it is an animated film intended primarily for viewing in standard movie theatres and projection rooms, and in the second, it is a gallery installation composed of synchronized projections and artefacts (dolls and miniature models) arranged in the space, with which the animated material was realized. Therefore, the gallery presentation of Family Portrait – which is the subject here –confronts visitors with two compatible or complementary realities: a two-dimensional virtual and a three-dimensional physical one. In fact, the project was developed as a kind of work in progress, which Lea gradually revealed by intermittently exhibiting some of its parts. The exhibition at the Meštrović Pavilion of the Croatian Society of Fine Artists marked the end of this process, and all interested parties can finally experience Family Portrait in its entirety. Unlike the film, in which the artist treats the basic narrative line linearly, that is, successively, by means of gallery projections – seven of them – she affirms the principle of simultaneity and fragments the entire plot into the same number of spatially conditioned segments. Why spatially conditioned? Namely, the action of Lea’s puppet animation takes place in a large family house in which there are seven rooms of different purposes, with each projection thematizing the events in one of them. Lea is a master of creating specific narratives, whose predominantly dark moods are sometimes imbued with restrained humour or irony. The protagonists of Family Portrait do not express their existentially intonated anxiety in an overtly pathetic or dramatic way; they primarily emanate apathy, the cause of which lies in mostly suppressed but fatally persistent tensions. According to her own words, when creating the basic plot of Family Portrait, Lea was inspired by a quote from the Japanese Buddhist thinker and peace activist Daisaku Ikeda, according to which every family has its own specific circumstances and problems that only it can truly understand. The artist lucidly brings all the recipients of the gallery version of this work from the potential position of uninterested, uninformed and indifferent passers-by into an active voyeur position from which they will be able to immerse themselves in – as Ikeda would say – the circumstances and problems of one family, fictitious but by no means unrealistically atypical. And thanks to the projections that treat the place of action fragmentarily and its temporal sequence integrally, various forms of immersion are possible, that is, according to individual perceptual judgement. We, therefore, enter the plot through a character or a room that we choose ourselves.
As one of the hallmarks of Lea’s creativity, it is certainly worth highlighting her exquisite sense for the virtuoso performance of meticulously chosen details. Let us mention just a few examples, such as indicating the reflections in the mirror, the recognizability of landscape motifs in room paintings, or the readability of the newspaper headlines, from which we can conclude that the action takes place approximately one month before the outbreak of World War I. As for the content itself, Lea humorously evokes the process of transformation from an everyday and predictable rut to a state of unrest caused by a sudden but also mass family visit. The disruption that ensues is symbolically foreshadowed by the vibrations caused by the vehicle in which the guests arrive, to continue through suppressed expressions of confusion, intolerance, and even minor human weaknesses. The household chores performed by the maid take on the character of unnatural forcedness, the animals add an additional dose of restlessness, and the new vibrations caused by the somewhat grotesque sexual intercourse also carry a certain symbolic charge.
In short, in Lea’s interpretation, anxiety, i.e., indications of a potential impending collapse, manifests itself through ordinary, non-explicit dramatic actions or moods. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to state that Family Portrait has something of the poetics that Raymond Carver expresses in his prose. Of course, with full preservation of the artist’s original authenticity and awareness, and therefore recognizability.
VANJA BABIĆ
Lea Vidaković is a multimedia artist working in the field of animated installations and extended media, using the technique of stop-animation and puppet film. Her research in the field of animated film is based on the theme of fragmented and other alternative types of narratives for animated installations and extended media. She graduated from the Graphic Arts Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, completed animation studies at HVO in Norway, and master’s studies in audio-visual art at the Royal Academy of Arts KASK in Belgium. In 2020, she earned her PhD in animation from the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She has exhibited at numerous group and solo exhibitions in Croatia, Italy, France, Singapore, Serbia, Switzerland, Egypt, Portugal, Norway, Montenegro, Belgium and Austria, and her films have been screened at 200+ animated film festivals worldwide. She has participated in several scientific conferences and art residencies in Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Iceland. She has won several art and film awards. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), Union of Associations of Fine Artists of Vojvodina (SULUV), Society of Animation Studies (SAS) and Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New Technologies (CICANT). She is a professor of animation and photography in animation at the Lusophone University in Lisbon. She lives and works in Zagreb and Lisbon.
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