In Zagreb, Croatia
8 May – 2 June 2010
Opening: Saturday, 8 May 2010, 12 pm
Former building of the
Museum of Contemporary Art
Katarinski trg 2 & Galerija Nova, Teslina 7
Zagreb, Croatia
– and –
“As soon as I open my eyes, I see a film (cinema clubs and the Genre Film Festival/GEFF)” / Ana Janevski (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej in Warsaw)
Didactic Exhibition: Abstract Art
Ideology of Design: Fragments on History of Yugoslav Design
Art Symposium Wroclaw ’70
Curators: Dóra Hegyi and Zsuzsa László (tranzit. hu), Magdalena Ziolkowska and Katarzyna Sloboda (Muzeum Sztuki Lodz), kuda.org; and What, How & for Whom/WHW
The exhibition “Art Always Has Its Consequences” considers the “politics of exhibiting” and, by including historic works and new productions, archive material and research documentation, reconstructing and reinterpreting paradigmatic artistic and exhibition positions from the 1950s until today, shows the historical continuity of similar art experiments which question the social role of art.
The exhibition has emerged as a result of a two-year collaborative project of the organizations tranzit. hu from Budapest, Muzeum Sztuki from Lodz, New Media Centre_kuda.org from Novi Sad and What, How and for Whom/WHW from Zagreb. Through various formats the project deals with topics connected with the modernistic inheritance and joint history. The research was directed towards a specific historical, economic and political context and also towards the forming of internationally recognized “universal” norms, in relationship to which the exhibited art practices try to affirm historical continuity and to question their own context.
As the result of years of collaborative practice, the exhibition “Art Always Has Its Consequences” is based on the temporary and current constellation of ongoing researches trying to draw parallels and define touching points of different related practices, and despite the accent on art production from Eastern Europe, in no sense is there any ambition to offer a homogenising picture of the “Eastern European” art of the last few decades, nor to yield to statistics as a policy of presentation.
The title “Art Always Has Its Consequences” is taken from the conceptual text of Mladen Stilinović “Footwriting” from 1984, and refers to research of the relationship which art has with reality, but also to the equal importance of internal, intrinsically art procedures by which art is repeatedly “limited” to the field of art. The exhibition is being held at the Kulmer Palace on Katarinski Square in Zagreb, and the presented art works and investigations are confronted with the material and ideological memory of the building itself, which for years served as the main space of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, later renamed to the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition confronts contemporary approaches with the strategies used in the past, inviting the reading of the presented works in relation to the questions of the role and responsibility of art institutions, the way in which they are positioned towards the economic and ideological circumstances and the way in which they contribute to the forming of cultural influences and hegemonisation of certain norms.
The exhibition “Art Always Has Its Consequences” opens on 8 May, on the Day of the Liberation of Zagreb in 1945. Today, at a time of epoch-making realignment in relation to the Second World War and the tendency of equating Nazism and Communism under the general term “totalitarianism”, this choice of date is dedicated to the emancipatory sequence of the National Liberation Struggle as the basic point of reference from which we can look into the future.
A publication documenting the project will be published in August 2010.
The exhibition has been realized in collaboration with 3rd Subversive Film Festival, whose theme this year is Socialism. www.subversivefilmfestival.com
Opening hours:
Tuesdays – Saturdays
12.00 – 20.00
Sundays
11.00 – 14.00
Contact:
What, How and for Whom / WHW
Slovenska 5, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
whw@mi2.hr
Tel: + 3851 3907 261
Fax: +3851 3906 873
With support from:
ERSTE Foundation
City Office for Culture, Education and Sport of the City of Zagreb
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
National Foundation for the Development of Civil Society Croatia
The exhibition is part of the project “Art Always Has Its Consequences”, organised with support of the programme Culture 2007-2013 of the European Union.
The organisers of the project “Art Always Has Its Consequences” are: New Media Centre_kuda.org, Novi Sad; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; tranzit. hu, Budapest; and What, How & for Whom/WHW, Zagreb
