Hopscotch
Gallery MC, New York
HOP – SCOTCH Exhibition as modular system
Alen Floricic, Davor Kliman, Fulvio Juricic, Robert Pauletta, Robert Sošic, Olja Stipanovic, Bojan Šumonja + Video programme screenings Young Croatian Video 2000 – 2006
Curated by: Branka Bencic
Hop Scotch offers the audience a possible way of seeing and walking through the exhibition. As child’s game draws possible paths on the floor, the exhibition draws its fragmentary structure as spatial strategies of connecting different individual works and aesthetic positions. Jumping from one to another, next and / or above, returning, missing, crossing, jumping over… Once before I have used the exhibition-making strategy from literature, exploiting a literary model, its structure, transfering it to both, the exhibition’s concept, selection of works and its spatial organization, it’s installation. It was Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italian novelist Italo Calvino. This time Hopscotsh by Julio Cortasar offered an interesting angle we could place artworks with. A system or structure is what holds exhibition together. The inner logic emerged later.
Here diverse artistic production and strategies by several arists that live in a closely defined geographic area – region of Istria in Croatia is put togetherby trying to avoid stereotype notions of East European art, avoiding the reduction of represented art practices to a (national) common denominator, showing its translocal caracter and a way to function as „open work“. Artists critically investigate questions on individual and collective existance and indicate personal or social commentaries in the background of our common daili lives. Constructed by means of language and representation, identities are not a stable unity of consciousness, but a changing thread of ideological positions built as a temporary meeting point of subjects and codes on the crossroads of different social formations and personal histories. By diverse strategies artists create an individual language as well as context and environment for the artwork, establishing relationships towards artistic, institutional and non-institutional context. Showing the symbolic capital of society’s fetishes and values. Through structures of fragments, repetition and montage represent a subjective fragmented mosaic structure of the world, display banal everyday activities that by slipping signifiers took a critical position spiced with irony and humour.
Exhibiting artists: Space 1 ALEN FLORICIC: Untitled (selected videos) (dvd) FULVIO JURICIC: Black screens DAVOR KLIMAN: Choose your game, 2001. (foto dokumentacija). OLJA STIPANOVIC: Walking, serija fotografija ROBERT SOŠIC: Sleeper, fotografija i performance Space 2 (office)_ Painting Bojan ŠUMONJA: Sheeps Robert PAULETTA: autoportreti ili crni ili ovi po fotkama Gallery talk and Film Programme_screenings PR 1 (dvd1): Young Croatian Video 2000 – 2006 (kompilacija, 75min) [A. Floricic, N. Hewitt, G. Škofic, T. Dabo, M. Debeljuh, A. Hušman, L. Rašcic]
