[spectre] Exhibition announcement: You are kindly invited to attend | 4 September, 19.00 pm.

[Open Space]

° *You are kindly invited to attend *| 5 September - 2 October 2012



Opening: 4 September, 19.00 pm.



Project curator: Branka Stipančić



Participating artists:



Boris Cvjetanović

Mangelos

Vlado Martek

Dalibor Martinis

Mladen Stilinović

Goran Trbuljak
Josip Vaništa





In 1962 in Zagreb Josip Vaništa, the head of Gorgona Group, sent an
invitation to fifty addresses culled from the address book of Studio G. The
invitation read as follows: "You are kindly invited to attend" without
saying where or why they were invited. The invitation card mentioned
practically nothing specific, only this text, a simple thought: invitation
to Nothing.



The work speaks of absence and silence. Silence, as Susan Sontag says in
her famous essay "Aesthetics of Silence", is only one element in a work of
art. "As long as a human eye is looking, there is always something to see.
To look at something which is 'empty' is still to be looking, still to be
seeing something - if only the ghosts of one's own expectations. In order
to perceive fullness, one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness which
marks it off..." The statement "You are invited..." makes use of a social
convention too, in order to distort it and to function subversively in art.
By inserting itself into the very structure of the way the gallery works,
it criticizes it from within.  The work is entirely outside the pictorial
tradition and opens up many questions about the gallery context.  At the
same time, it is a neo-Dada provocation that confuses, and a conceptual
action that raises the basic questions: what, where and why?



The works have been chosen on the basis of the concept of either absence or
emptiness, as well as on the notion that the works are defined via the
elements of the artistic context. Accordingly works from the following
artists from Zagreb have been selected:  Mangelos, a member of the Group
Gorgona which was active in Zagreb in the 1960s, and the works by the
generation of Conceptual and Postconceptual artists:  Goran Trbuljak,
Dalibor Martinis, Mladen Stilinović, Vlado Martek, and Boris Cvjetanović.



Mangelos, an art historian, a critic and curator, who was at same time an
artist, started his career in the postwar period with the groups of
works: *Tabule
rasae*, *Negation de la peinture* and *school slates* (blacks monochromes
surfaces with text underneath) which express a state of oblivion and the
setting for a new beginning. Goran Trbuljak explores the relationship
between the artists and the gallery system. His poster work
*Retrospective*(1981) in effect includes three of his solo shows, each
of which consisted
of a single exhibited poster, with the following statements: *I don't want
to show anything new and original*; *The Fact that someone has a chance to
make an exhibition is more important that what will be exhibited at that
exhibition*; *With this exhibition I am demonstrating the continuity of my
work*. In his installation *Artist at Work* (1978) Dalibor Martinis sets up
the conditions in which his work will be realized by itself, while Mladen
Stilinović in the series of photographs with the same title (1978) puts up
the idea that work of an artist is hard to quantify; furthermore, the
artist glorifies the concept of laziness in the practice of art.



There is negation and, at the same time, analytical approach to the poetry
in Vlado Martek's *Pre-poetry* works from the 1980s: the Sonnets keep the
poetic form but discard the poetic content. Two video tapes, *No Title (Cut)
* by Trbuljak and *Open Reel* by Martinis (both from 1976), explore the
medium and its boundaries to the point when it does not function any more.



Photographs *Graffiti* (1986-87) by the artist Boris Cvjetanović record
street graffiti - the "fight" between the graffiti artists and the state,
which also secretly and anonymously "corrects" the graffiti at night -
underlying ideological and social context in which all these works have
been created, in order not to neglect or forget it when close-reading these
works.





*supported by*:*
*


BM:UKK

ERSTE Foundation

Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7

* *

*kind support provided by:*



MUMOK - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation

* *

* *

*About us:*

Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days
by appointment only. Admission free

*Open Systems *

Zentrum für Kunstprojekte

Lassingleithnerplatz 2

A- 1020 Vienna

Austria



(+43) 699 115 286 32



for more info: office at openspace-zkp.org



http://www.openspace-zkp.org



*Open Systems* - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the most vital
facilities for art concerned with contributing a model strategy for
cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new
approach.
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