Tina Gverović and Marko Tadić: Horizon of Expectations

Curated by Branka Benčić
Comissioner: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Organization: Moderna galerija – National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
 

The Horizon of Expectations at the Croatian Pavilion presents artists Tina Gverović and Marko Tadić. The project is shaped as a double solo exhibition and it’s based on the production of new artworks, developed specifically for the pavilion. The exhibition will include a complex installation by each artist: Phantom Trades: Sea of People by Tina Gverović and Events Meant to be Forgotten by Marko Tadić.

Structured as a fragmentary narrative, Horizon of Expectations brings together two artistic positions that deal with issues of uncertainty, tension or collapse, and how they relate to different conditions and contexts. Tina Gverović and Marko Tadić engage with conceptual procedures and subjective imagination inscribed in spatial and temporal discontinuities, in a process that encompasses contingency and actively engages our perceptual space. 

Using different media Tina Gverović creates works in the form of disorienting installations that engage with the space, territory and identity, and how these concepts are bound to imagination. In Phantom Trades: Sea of People (developed in collaboration with artist Ben Cain), an installation based on paintings, video and objects and text, she continues to explore processes and accumulations, history and materiality, bodies in transit, as moving masses or geopolitical entities.

Marko Tadić continues to explore his long-term interest in the legacy of modernism and the actualisation of its utopian potential. His works represent a look back at the recent history as a visual narrative of obsolete remains and elements of visual arts, architecture or everyday imagery, building up an unusual atmosphere of oblivion, highlighting the possibilities of re-reading the  past. He de- and re- constructs a modernist vocabulary seeing it as new potential constructions.

Avoiding a fixed narrative that defines a certain content, the exhibition takes part in creating a series of gaps, ruptures and renegotiations as places of potential transformation and imagination, staging mechanisms of visibility—framing of space and time, place and identity. In this way a "horizon of expectations" takes into account both our individual and collective experiences we share as audience, framing local hi/stories into global contexts and uncertain possibilities of identification.

About the artists
Tina Gverović graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, completed a postgraduate study at Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and holds a doctorate from Middlesex University in London. She has recently exhibited at Suzhou Documents – Biennial (Suzhou, 2016), Raum mit Licht Gallery (Vienna, 2015), Tate Modern (London, 2014), and The Garden of Learning – Busan Biennial (Busan, 2012). Lives and works between London and Dubrovnik.

Marko Tadić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy. Exhibits works both in museums and galleries and film festivals in Croatia and internationally. Held solo and group exhibitons at venues in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Vienna, Kassel, Utrecht, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York. Holds teaching positions at Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and NABA, Milano. Born in 1979 in Sisak, Croatia, lives and works in Zagreb.

About the curator
Branka Benčić is an independent curator and art historian based in Croatia. Over the past decade she has curated group exhibitions, artiststs solo projects and film screenings in Croatia and internationally. Her basic research, writing and curatorial interests are focused on contemporary art, exhibiting film and video, experimental cinema, exhibition histories in former Yugoslavia. She acts as Artistic director at Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art, Founder and Curator at Cinemaniac–Think Film at Pula Film Festival and curator of Artists Cinema, screening program at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.
 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication edited by Branka Benčić, with essays by Branka Benčić, Clemens Krummel and Marco Scotini and designed by Andro Giunio.

Architecture/exhibition design: Lovro Skoblar, Ben Cain

The participation of Croatia at the 57th Venice Biennale is organized by Moderna Galerija – National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb with financial support provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. Additional support by City of Pula, Tourist Board Vodnjan, Kreativni Sindikat, HAVC Croatian Audiovisual Center and Laura Bulian Gallery.

Contact
croatian.pavilion.venice [​at​] gmail.com

Lana Šetka, PR at Moderna galerija, Zagreb: info [​at​] modgal.t-com.hr