Contemporary Croatian artists show their works
Exhibition of contemporary Croatian art "This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it."; was opened on Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. This is the ninth year that this exhibition offers a cross-section of recent Croatian art, reports tportal.hr on March 11, 2016.
The opening ceremony included two performances: "Unease, anxiety" by Tanja Dabo, who used a wall in the museum to write out a text about long-term unease and anxiety which she feels about herself as an artist who is not producing artistic works; and "Path" by Ljiljana Mihaljević, in which she plays hopscotch drawn on the floor of the museum, but without "Heaven" as a reward for the effort and skill of players. However, the artist says that "in life, there is also no final reward because each ending always brings a new beginning; the prize is life itself, the actual prize is to have a chance for new beginnings in life".
Every year, this exhibition gives a chance to artists and the audience for new beginnings, to create and to question the meaning of art and life. Unlike in Croatian politics, the gender ratio at the exhibition is quite balanced: among 39 selected works, 17 were produced by female artists and 22 by male artists. As for the works themselves, there are seven installations, six photographic works, four films, and the rest are drawings, prints, objects, multimedia installations, paintings, video works and two performance acts.
The range of topics is, as usual, very extensive, but in recent years, there has been a noted increase in the trend of discussing the environment and ecology in their broadest sense. Jury member Marco Scotini, an independent curator and art critic from Milan, noted: "In many works the topic is no longer the consumption of natural resources, but the disposal of residues of the past (including metaphorically). The natural landscape is more and more a topic of dystopia and is always marked by political references, past and present, as well as by the theatre of social memory." It is interesting that there are more and more works in which time is the common denominator, but also those works that deal with the artistic medium as an instrument of presentation.
During the exhibition, the expert committee will award three prizes: the first prize worth 50,000 kuna, the second prize worth 45,000 kuna, and the third prize worth 40,000 kuna. However, the audience will also be able to choose the best work, which will be rewarded with 10,000 kuna.
