[spectre] <dis.location> exhibition . Zagreb

[fritzd at chello.nl]

<dis.location>


.:: 29 . 04 > 15 . 05 . 2003
.:: Zagreb City Museum . Opaticka 20 . Zagreb

.:: opening 29 . 04 . 19 h
.:: openingspeech by prof.dr. Janwillem Schrofer . president of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam


.:: artists:
Darko Fritz | Ana Kadoic | Svebor Kranjc | David Maljkovic | Lala Rascic

.:: curator: Darko Fritz

.:: http://www.netherlandsembassy.hr/dislocation.htm


<dis.location> is a joint project by the Museum of Contemporary Art - Zagreb, the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, the Zagreb City Museum and the Netherlands Embassy.




<dis.location>

Exhibition shows works of Croatian participants on postgraduate study of the fine arts at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In the framework of different authorial aesthetics a common invisible link has been found through artistic treatment of location, i.e. issue of identity.  

There is a common link among the artists mentioned above though they lived and worked temporarily in different social and cultural surroundings, which usually contain different historical moments. This confirms the thesis that 'nineties' in the Croatian art, caused by the war activities, did not appear until the very end of respective decade. Kranjic started his two years study at the Rijksakademie in 1989, Fritz in 1990, Kadoic in 2001 and Rascic and Maljkovic in 2003. When mentioned the years have been observed through 'locally burdened perception of time', average citizen in the Croatia will connect these years with the outbreak of the war in Croatia.  

A very interesting social situation has been created when artists, immigrants, treat a theme of location in their work, re-examining their own and collective identity. Themes of the exhibited works are mostly explicit social ones which includes approach of 'private is political'. 'Contemporary investigations into identity in the visual arts have had to be aware of sliding into the fixed positions which institutions and curators like to see. This has met negotiating identity on three levels; the level of oneself, the level of others and the level of regulatory discursive practices. Performance and time-based art with stress on the momentary and the contingent have proved to be remarkably relevant and appropriate to this set of careful negotiations.'[1] Inside of the art production showed common theme 'location / territory' through different formal aspects.  Exhibited works are released mostly in the time - based media of mobile pictures  [video art, documentary films]. Theoret
 ician Arjun Appadurai quotes that: 'in the era of globalisation, the circulation of media images and the movement of migrants created new disjunctures between location, imagination and identity. ... Many social locations throughout the world, especially those characterised by media saturation and migrant populations, 'moving images meet mobile audiences', thus disturbing the stability of many sender-receiver models of mass communication. ... Migrants have a complex relation to the practices of memory and, thus, of making of archives ... Memory, for immigrants, is always a memory of loss.' [2]


Footnotes:
[1] Niru Ratnam: Identity and the Visual Arts; Locus Solus - site, identity, technology in contemporary art, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2000 
[2] Arjun Appadurai: Archive and Aspiration; Information is Alive  - Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, ed. Arjen Mulder, V2_/NAi publishers, Rotterdam, 2003


Represented works:

Darko Fritz: 'Home', graphic / art poster, from the Migrant Navigator project, 2002.
The 'Home' poster consists of an image of 'Home' icon from Netscape Navigator browser. Unlike the original 'Home' icon here is printed in black and silver and white. It is blown-up to 2 x 2 meters and displayed at white background [variable dimensions up to billboard size]. At first showing, the posters are displayed at the commercial billboards close to Croatian borders. Apart of 'Home' icon there is no further information at the poster. Here is no other product behind this advertising campaign; i.e. the poster is advertising its own image and message.

Darko Fritz: 'Crypted TV porn', video installation, 1999.
'Crypted TV porn' is a visual composition of crypted [coded] TV signal dislocated into the physical space [of the art installation]. TV broadcasters crypting the video signal for one which don’t pay subscription fee. Nevertheless such a signals are present in both the air and at the Amsterdam TV cable. In particular, TV programme with hard-core porno films was recorded. Within unregular rhythms of distorted and noisy moving images of unsynchronised video signal the image processing just happened by itself: polarisation, black and white and colour negative inversions, image moving out of frame horizontal and vertical, strobo- effect etc. Only occasional freezing of the video-image were used in the video editing. Additional random video-effect happened during the transfer of analogue to digital video image.

Darko Fritz and Kristina Leko: 'Speeches', video, 1991.
Documentary on young people from Croatia from art-and-culture circle from Zagreb who finds them in September 1991 in Amsterdam during the outbreak of the war in Croatia. Fourteen individual portraits are made using 'image in image' video technique. The first level using 'one-shot' video and sound while the other image has several sources suggested or made by portraited persons.

Ana Kadoic: 'Reconstruction', video installation, 2002.
One-channel video projection shows extreme-slow-motion video image of few seconds of real-time event extended into 15 minutes. Image shows a number of small magnets colliding from a position of a regular pattern into the state of chaos, randomness. From that state process was also 'brought back together' by reversing the shot. The whole experiment was consisting of putting magnets to face each other’s equal polls, which means they would 'reject' each other. In those condition author was trying to organise a regular pattern, going against their 'inner collective order - code'. The event of collision, when the state of regularity suddenly bursts into chaos takes a split second. In that moment each magnet takes completely unpredictable path to take place in a new order, and each one of those collisions seems to be a 'random, individual case for itself'. The sound of colliding magnets is also 'stretched' and follows the image in slow motion. 

Svebor Kranjc: 'Zagreb Virus 1990,' conceptual action, 1990.
Subversive action 'Zagreb Virus 1990' has been held at 'Youth Salon' exhibition in 1990 in Zagreb. Accompanied and supported by his friends Kranjic registered for the exhibition lot of artistic works with a susceptible quality and in the different styles. Jury 'passed' for the exhibition several works and at the exhibition Kranjic personally gave to the exhibition visitors his own publication in which he explained entering of the 'virus which body did not recognised', demystificated part of the authorships of exhibited works and part of them left undiscovered.


Sever Kranjc: 'Net', video, 1995.
Documentary on making and understanding of the Tibetan sand-Mandala, uncovering striking similarities between the ancient Tibetan knowledge and contemporary Chaos Theory and digital culture.

Svebor Kranjc: 'Profession Refugee', video, 2000.
A documentary film with refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Croatia, Tibet, Yugoslavia, Kurdistan and Iran who are living in The Netherlands, with representative of UNHCR and with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as a special guest. News archive material of various refugee crises in the world is edited together in a story of war, danger and escape. Then film shift to Amsterdam was Ms. Nives Rebernak is presented. She is a founder and director of 'HOME for peace and non-violence', a refugee-oriented grassroots organisation that has functioned within her own living room since 1991. During the ex-Yugoslavian wars hundreds of people have literally found refuge in this apartment, disregarding their national and religious differences. The film goes on introducing personal reflections of ten refugees from all over the world, all currently living in the Netherlands where they managed [or not!] to integrate in the Dutch society. Film culminate with the private audience with the 14th Dalai 
 Lama in Den Haag, a 'veteran refugee'. Chinese Army has driven Dalai Lama out of Tibet in 1959. 

David Maljkovic: 'Paintings with a secondary roles', from the opus 'Paintings with a limited premeditation', oil on canvas, 2002.
Both paintings contain secondary figures taken from the painting 'Coronation of the King Tomislav' made by Oton Ivekovic in 1904 - 1905. These secondary figures supports main narrative motive in the original scene of the historical picture. In the Maljkovic's work they are in the new subjective ambient. Meaning of the dislocation spreads with the contents of the picture. Pictures are changing their meanings depending of the location of the exhibition. Painter said: 'painting is never exhibit in its own last ethape unless it is exhibit in the museum. Galleries are always preparation for the next journey for the picture. I think that picture does not have its own ended exhibited space. In same pictures with a limited premeditation polysemantc occurred but not to mystify pictures but to let absence in the existing motives. To let a painting to take a breath away and to avoid offered unpleasant visions.'  

Lala Rascic: 'Locations': 'Location 1', 'Location of Memory', 'The Gorge', video, 2002 - 2003.
>From the series 'Location' three works have been shown using split-screen video technique. Theme of the location has been taken like a motive, which is different in every picture. Lacation as phenomena has been taken in the physical and geographical sense and in the aspect of Lefevbre's spatial practice [space as a ground of all aspects, elements and moments social impact] and like a memory. 'Location 1' consist of parallel registration of a private space at home and location of temporary accommodation of a homeless people in Varazdiin, place where this work will be exhibit for the first time. 'Location of Memory' contain parallel view of zoom-in photography of a flat in Sarajevo where the artist spent her childhood and the reconstruction of the same space, by memory, in the form of vector animation. 'The Gorge' show two aspects of the same location of wood's landscape with a short appearance of the author with her dog. In all works locations has been discovered through the a
 rtist's subjective feelings. Documentary objectiveness has been reviewed analytically through [zoom-in] enlargements. New contents have been constructed through the relationships of two pictures in split screens.  






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