March 21, 7 PM, Gorgona hall, Museum of Contemporary art, Zagreb
The artistic practice by Croatian artist Zaltko Kopljar regardless the medium in which it is produced – performance, photography and film/video establishes a hybrid field of complex existential positions and different media engaging the presence of the artist himself as the strategy of performance. His work questions the relations of power, as relations between the individual and the institution, body, and world.
Four film/video works gathered into the program From K series form a cross-section of the artist’s film/video production over the last 3 years.
K17 (2012) opens the program and marks the author’s return to New York, the city where in 2003 the artist produced a series of photographs as photography based performance in urban space – K9 Compassion. Meanwhile a change in the global financial landscape transforming institutions of (financial) power. New York from the K17 is a place of different circumstances, and the image of the world. K14 (2010) is located in a newly built urban environment on the periphery only partially inhabited. The new architecture represents a blank space and is mapped by a narrative about loneliness and disappearance. K15 (2012) establishes itself as a re-enactment, the transposition of the documentary material available on You Toube, which brings the famous gesture of kneeling showing Willy Brandt in Warsaw, and it is associated with a number of Kopljar’s performance gestures of kneeling as an act of an individual. The program ends with a short film, K16 (2012), where a central place is a scene of digging a hole. There is no end in sight to the digging, a hole, an abyss, the absurdity, futility, the incompleteness are main issues around which the narrative is formed and meaning of the work produced. In his works Zlatko Kopljar appears in person, dressed in white, reflective suit. Moving through space and situations, slowly, as a solitary witness, bystander, passer by.
The program will include 4 recent films by Zlatko Kopljar produced between 2010 and 2012. It is the first screening of K15, K16, K17 in Croatia.
Program
K17, HD video, 10′ 49” (2012)
K14, HD video, 12′ 5″ (2010)
K15, HD video, 4′ 21” (2012)
K16, HD video, 10′ 42” (2012)
Zlatko Kopljar (1962) is a visual artist. He has exhibited at Sao Paulo Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, The Kitchen – New York, etc. His work are in collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Museum of Modern Art Zagreb, Filip Trade collection, etc. He graduated painting in 1991 with professor Carmelo Zotti from Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Italy and currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. www.kopljar.net
ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a program activity of the MSU established in 2012, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program presents recent film/video works outside the context of production of entertainment and spectacle. It completes the programmatic conception of the MSU are complementing the presentation of this hybrid form. It will intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way we will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving images.
Project Manager: Tihomir Milovac / Curator: Branka Benčić