Exhibition concept: Darko Fritz
<dis.location> is a joint project by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, the Zagreb City Museum and the Netherlands Embassy in Zagreb.
The exhibition shows works of Croatian participants on postgraduate study of the fine arts at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. In the framework of different authorial aesthetics a common invisible link has been found through artistic treatment of location, i.e. issue of identity.
There is a common link among the artists mentioned above though they lived and worked temporarily in different social and cultural surroundings, which usually contain different historical moments. This confirms the thesis that 'nineties' in the Croatian art, caused by the war activities, did not appear until the very end of respective decade. Kranjc started his two years study at the Rijksakademie in 1989, Fritz in 1990, Kadoić in 2001 and Raščić and Maljković in 2003. When mentioned years have been observed through 'locally burdened perception of time', average citizen in the Croatia will connect these years with the outbreak of the war in Croatia.
A very interesting social situation has been created when artists, immigrants, treat a theme of location in their work, re-examining their own and collective identity. Themes of the exhibited works are mostly explicit social ones which include approach of 'private is political'.
'Contemporary investigations into identity in the visual arts have had to be aware of sliding into the fixed positions which institutions and curators like to see. This has met negotiating identity on three levels; the level of oneself, the level of others and the level of regulatory discursive practices. Performance and time-based art with stress on the momentary and the contingent have proved to be remarkably relevant and appropriate to this set of careful negotiations.' [1]
Inside of the art production showed common theme 'location / territory' through different formal aspects. Exhibited works are released mostly in the time-based media of mobile pictures [video art, documentary films].
Theoretician Arjun Appadurai quotes that: 'in the era of globalisation, the circulation of media images and the movement of migrants created new disjunctures between location, imagination and identity. ... Many social locations throughout the world, especially those characterised by media saturation and migrant populations, 'moving images meet mobile audiences', thus disturbing the stability of many sender-receiver models of mass communication. ... Migrants have a complex relation to the practices of memory and, thus, of making of archives ... Memory, for immigrants, is always a memory of loss.' [2]
Darko Fritz
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[1] Niru Ratnam: Identity and the Visual Arts; Locus Solus – site, identity, technology in contemporary art, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2000
[2] Arjun Appadurai: Archive and Aspiration: Information is Alive – Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, ed. Arjen Mulder, V2_NAI publishers, Rotterdam. 2003
