Who’s the Best Young Croatian Visual Artist?
At the exhibition FINALE 2011! held at the Galežnica Gallery the Radoslav Putar Award was awarded to young visual artists up to 35 years of age. This year’s finalists were as follows: the team of Dora Budor & Maja Čule, Ana Hušman, Nina Kurtela and Marko Marković. The panel of judges consisting of Davor Sanvincenti, last year’s award winner, artist Lisa Harlev, art critic Marko Golub, curator Olga Majcen Linn and the President of the Institute for Contemporary Art, which initiated this Award, Janka Vukmir, selected Marković as this year’s winner, with his work Model Suit.
Along with the Award, a six-week stay at the New York study program is also granted as well as an independent exhibition in Zagreb, set to be held for the first time at the Academia Moderna Gallery which the Institute for Contemporary Art shares with the Academia Moderna Institute and the Institute for Contemporary Architecture as of recent.
The award-winning Marković was born in Osijek, and graduated from the Art Academy in Split. The Festival organizer is DOPUST, where he displayed the work which ensured him this award. We covered this year’s DOPUST here.
The work Model Suit is a performance which emerged as a reaction to the social, economic and cultural landscape of contemporary Croatia. The male and female workers of the company Dalmacijavino and the textile factory Uzor join forces with the artist and act out a joint performance. In an alternative, art world alongside the song “Where Is This Ship Sailing?” performed by the Dalmacijavino male workers, the female workers of Uzor take the artists’ measurements while reading their manifest and jointly spreading the same message: “We don’t want anyone’s charity, we want to earn our money!” They strive to tailor a new society model while tailoring suits for the artist/worker. Sending the artist into the world, decked out in a Model Suit, their message materializes and spreads the word. The work integrates a critical standpoint and a synergic reaction to the desperate Croatian reality, thus winning the judges over with its engagement, activism, courage, visual art expression and shape, energy and attitude.
Being shortlisted in the final round means recognition for the artists and their quality, courage, choice of topics and way of presenting themselves through their works. Thus the remaining finalists deserve a special mention.
As we’ve featured the Budor & Čule design team on numerous occasions, you can read more on their work here. At the Galežnica Gallery they presented themselves with the work Substitutes for Present Sense. The work is an installation with photos and video clips that came into being within the process of documenting performance practices and certain kinds of behaviours. What’s visible in their work are distorted and transformed elements from archetypal art forms and the everyday environment which thus become foreign and evoke discomfort due to a lack of desire to own them, the desire to own something being standard practice for contemporary man towards objects surrounding him.
In the work Football, Ana Hušman works with body and voice movement and the way various media outlets notes them. By reconstructing Maradona’s goal from the 1986 Argentina and England match the artist questions ways that it reflects social, familial, and political relations.
Transformance is a video work of Nina Kurtela that activates and documents a five-month long performance where the artist by her daily presence bears witness to the transformation of a warehouse for fixing trams and buses into the dance institution Uferstudios in Berlin.
You can check out the FINALE 2011! Exhibition at the Galežnica Gallery in Velika Gorica until July 17th. The Gallery’s opening hours are from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM Saturdays and Sundays.
Tonči Kranjčević Batalić
