Alen Floricic exploits self -referential representation where he places his own body as the basic motive, while at the same time questioning the technical possibilities of digital image manipulation. Put on an abstract non-representational black background, Floricic's silhouette is an icon, a sign, a paradigmatic example that points to the disturbing space between the physical and imaginary, human conditions, existential preoccupations and anxieties. Media manipulation and multiplication demonstrate the unstable character of our fragmented identities that are rhythmically orchestrated close to a "visual stuttering", found in early film or earlier in chrono-photographs by Muybridge or Marey. In these flickering scenes and broken images we spot the artificial and constructed character of the movement that underscores fractures in the social body.
Choose Your Game by Davor Kliman is of a documentation character. In this photo-documentation of intervention, in the form of a site-specific installation, the author almost through a "referendum-like" drawing on the floor asks questions, i.e. offers two possible answers. Through an act of artistic and social provocation he integrates several ideas - juxtaposing the idea of a children's game with a dangerous one, which, as it is suggested here, frequently has a fatal outcome. Two drawings on the floor can be a part of everyday life and reality. One represents squares indicating a children's game "Hopscotch" , the other one presents the contours of a life-size human figure in a lying position, which fortunately we do not come across so often in our immediate surrounding and reality, but in detective and CSI series.
Walking, a photo series by Olja Stipanovic is a mapping of daily routes. The photographs represent author's foot stepping out on various kinds of urban surfaces. The attention is directed to a daily activity of walking in the labyrinth of the city and drowning in the crowd, as the process of the pedestrian's adopting of the topographic experience. The author documents traces of her own movements, tells a story imprinting her body into the physical body of the city and its spiritual, social and imaginary context, awakening the consciousness of a routine activity as a signifying practice.
Her works are self-referential questioning of artist's own subjectivity and the position of his/her own visibility.
The performance Sleeper by Robert Sosic, presented for the first time in the Regional Museum of Rovinj, both as a performance and photograph, raises many issues - on art, art institutions, home town and its local art collection, the concept of fine arts (beaux arts), the consolation brought by the
works of art or feelings they arouse, as well as the position of traditional painting, old masters and contemporary art. The photograph, functioning as an independent work that developed as a documentation of performance is a meta-referential work, which although it refers to the position and
institution of Art, I prefer to perceive as a projection of a utopian and optimistic endeavor.
In the series of new works, that are almost considered as objects not only images or paintings
Fulvio Juricic elaborates an individual system of signs in which the information is on the verge of semantic noise. Compositions of a reduced dark color, almost monochromes, communicate closely with the context of art informel and we can also find out certain contiguity with the minimalist movement. By conceptualizing the method of reduction and repetition, discrete moves and graphic contrasts pointing out the uniqueness of the multi-layer structure of each work, the authors creates both rhythm and change in repetitiveness.
The paintings of Bojan Sumonja and Robert Pauletta speak in favor of the actualization of figurative art. Their artistic expression is eclectic, imbued with respect for painting tradition. There is a wide variety of interest, ranging from expressive figuration, references and quotations from visual culture in
general, literature, local traditions, to impulses from the immediate surroundings, details from everyday life, and also reaching out for post-modern means and procedures - irony, paraphrase, pastiche, kitsch, triviality, riddle, game...
Robert Pauletta's cycle Pittura nera focuses on the genre of self-portrait. The works from the cycle
Pittura nera present a series of variants, mostly double self-portraits, in which above the desire to present his image faithfully, as a motif at a certain level of reality and authenticity of presentation, the author aims at presenting the state - duality and anxiety of the de-centered subject. The painting is as a multi-layered system and work, the text is intended for reading and "interpreting" layers of meaning, and in the self-portrait the painter is both the author and model, subject and object, I myself and Alter ego.
The painting Sheep by Bojan Sumonja resembles some kind of inverted, amazing allegory. The flock of sheep, as the only motif of the work, floods the entire surface of the canvas. In the perspective of close and expressed foreground it seems as if the sheep will slip off the edge of the painting and the chosen colors summon up the effect of negative, and black and white photography. Such an effect of contrasting black and white, white fleece and black shadow, also present in black and white photography, puts an end to this idyllic scene of animals in a pastoral setting, thus creating an atmosphere of slight anxiety and uneasiness, insecurity and uncertainty, giving a meaning to the saying "the lost sheep". (Text by Branka Bencic)
Locating Identity: Young Croatian Video Artists [works 2000 – 2006]
Artists and videos:
Tanja Dabo Welcome; Matija Debeljuh La cantina Di Ferro
Alen Floričić Untitled, Nicole Hewitt Waltz, Ana Hušman Merzšpajz, Plac;
Lala Rascic 17 Stories; Goran Skofić Pilot
[Total running time 60 min]
The program presents works of seven young Croatian video artists working in Croatia, which were realized between 2000 and 2006.
The choice has been limited to the works of seven authors who are currently very active and productive, and the selection is restricted by external conditions - time and generation frame (time of work's origin and artist's date of birth) - it contains works of younger artists dated after 2000, that is until today. The selected works belong to the category of single-channel video; I saw most of them for the first time in the gallery where they were shown on a monitor/TV or in the form of a presentation, which indicates the different experience of the work's perception. So, numerous works that were presented as installations or multi-channel videos have not been included in the selection. The main point is the use of loop that disrupts the traditional sequence of beginning, middle and end, and emphasizes the insecurity and instability of media, which in this case, by works appearing one after the other, has in fact been rendered impossible.
The trend of digital boom that began at the end of the 1990s continues, when the video due to (economic, production...) accessibility of digital technology spread among the young generation of artists. Through a private view and personal prism the authors raise awareness of certain themes – individual and collective identities, social structures, inspiration with the idea of town and treating urban areas, cultural particularities as the practice of sign production in a wider social context.
Identity is not experienced as a fixed given condition, but as a construction, subject to changes and various influences that shape sex, society, setting, culture and other conditions – which become increasingly important elements in the process of creating a work of art, so identities become an established set of coordinates at the crossroads of diversity.
However, by some inner logic, development of inner discourse we can notice that some sub-groups with a common denominator - motif have crystallized. In such a way, on the mental vertical we can group works into the auto-referential, those that look into the matter of identity, individual and collective positions, analogy of urban structures with network structures of human
communication and psyche. So, it can well be said that in no other medium has the relation between art, technology and identity been studied with such consistency and critically analyzed to such an extent, as is the case with video. (Text by Branka Bencic)