Visual artist Andreja Kulunčić, whose work is one of the key oeuvres of socially engaged artistic practice in Croatia, presents herself for the first time with an all-encompassing solo exhibition that brings an overview of her artistic activity from the 1990s to the present day. The basis of the exhibition is the research and analysis of the potential of contemporary socially engaged visual artistic practice in changing the existing social situation, i.e., the artist’s statement that socially engaged art makes the world a better place with its doing. In her artistic practice, Andreja Kulunčić indicates the social injustices – she identifies them, studies their causes, and examines the possible manners of resistance. Her art is not only a reflection of reality, but also a tool for change which stimulates the audience into critical thinking and active participation.

With an insight into the artist’s thirty-year activity, Andreja Kulunčić’s exhibition will focus on topics such as feminism, migration, workers’ rights, gender equality, integration, and cultural diversity. Educational workshops and discussions related to the exhibition will enable the visitors’ active participation, stimulating them into critical thinking and engaging in key social questions. Intercultural cooperation is another important aspect of the exhibition programme. The activities connecting foreign workers with the local community will promote inclusivity and openness, whereby the Museum space will be presented as accessible to all social groups.

 

About the exhibition

The exhibition setup, co-authored by Andreja Kulunčić and exhibition curator Martina Munivrana (MSU, Zagreb) is structured in five thematic units: feminism, trauma, migration, self-organisation, and structural analysis of the artist’s methodology. Through these units, new work is presented, based on the curatorial research of the artist’s artistic activity and the re-examination of the function and form of a solo (retrospective) museum exhibition as a cultural agent – the propeller and initiator of change.

The exhibition includes the results of research arising from the artist’s collaboration with curators, with whom she worked on complex productions throughout her thirty-year artistic activity: Irena Bekić (Croatia), Amanda de la Garza Mata (Mexico), Anca Verona Mihulet (Romania / South Korea), and Katharina Schlieben (Germany). By exploring the diversities of her oeuvre, the artist expanded with the aforementioned collaboration her hitherto research with issues introduced within engaged social artistic practice according to the questions of representation, marginal activity, collaborative practices, the aesthetic act, etc. In other words, by investing her own practice into the experiment, Andreja Kulunčić establishes a wide basis for multilayered research of socially engaged art, its possible reflections and extensions, as well as the social phaenomena, perceived from different perspectives. The aforementioned collaborations and research will also result in abundant programme accompanying the exhibition, which will proceed through the discursive and educational work, as well as the work with the local community.

The visitors will be invited to participate in a variety of programmes accompanying the exhibition: a series of intercultural programmes, educational workshops, discursive programme, collective design of the MSU garden. With the exhibition and collaboration in the aforementioned programmes, the audience will be encouraged into solidarity and taking the collective risk of inclusion into opposing the paradigms of the privileged ones, who disregard the otherness reduced to survival. In such a synergy and stimulating activity, in a collective step-up which does not have to proceed only in the space of political power, an active field of action is created. In this process, the “I” is transformed into the collective “WE”.

The artist will present the following works at the exhibition: women.index, EQUALS – For the Acceptance of Diversity, You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It, We Learn to Make Space for Everyone, 1 CHF = 1 VOICE, Sight.seeing, Austrians Only, Bosnians Out! (Workers without Frontiers), On the State of the Nation, Creative Strategies, Sorry … Not Sorry, NAMA: 1908 Employees, 15 Department Stores, Teenage Pregnancy, and actualise three new works Museum Garden / Edible Museum, Micro-Situations of Togetherness: Creating the Experience of Being Together, and Meeting the Social Self.

 

Intercultural programme

As part of Andreja Kulunčić’s new project, intercultural programme will be held, connecting foreign workers with the local community with the aim of creating a collective experience and deliberating on coexistence. Foreign workers, who came to Croatia in good faith and with the desire for better life conditions, brought with themselves their own customs, culture, everyday habits, but also their hopes and fears. Neither we, the hosts, nor they, the new residents of Croatia, are always certain as to how collective future should be built and what unity in diversity actually means. The main focus of the programme – cultural diversity – will be developed through the deliberation on the hitherto coexistence and the collective vision of the future. The artist thereby relies on two key aspects: the questioning of fair relations (work- and life-wise) of foreign workers and the expansion of space of contemporary art through creating a platform for cultural exchange with the Filipino, Nepalese, and Indonesian communities living and working in Croatia.

Through their personal choice and collaboration, the exhibition will present the specificities of Filipino, Nepalese and Indonesian arts and cultures to the wider audience. The exhibition creates a space for dialogue and exchange, highlighting the cultural peculiarities of the Filipino, Nepalese and Indonesian communities, while simultaneously giving them an opportunity to connect with their heritage. The aim is to engage and introduce the wider audience to the rich tradition of these cultures, thereby stimulating better understanding and respect of cultural diversity in contemporary Croatian society.

 

Educational workshops and participative segments of the exhibition

Sixteen to eighteen educational workshops and several participative segments will be held as part of the exhibition, which will also include work with the audience and the local community. Andreja Kulunčić’s works are focused on socially engaged topics, collaboration with different audiences and collective projects, which will enable the visitors to actively participate in the programme.

The exhibition includes the following participative segments:

– women.index: During the exhibition, the women visitors are invited to dial a toll-free number and leave a voice message expressing their feelings of satisfaction, discrimination, or abuse. The results of the phone calls are shown on a display screen set up at a visible place in the city, on the internet and in the exhibition space, creating a visual representation of the social reality.

– You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It: The women visitors can participate in the action of creating a collective anti-monument that was initiated in the project’s previous exhibitions. By making a small sculpture out of clay, they symbolically dedicate each sculpture to each of the 850 women prisoners of the political prison camp on the islands of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur.

As part of the same project, reading groups and talks will be organised on the omission of women’s history (HERstory) from dominant historical narratives and on the specificities of women’s experience of trauma.

- Sorry ... Not Sorry: the audience can participate in a media radio intervention.

 

Creative strategies and The Museum Garden

So as to create a community in an urban garden as part of the wider project Creative Strategies, a new project is prepared, entitled Museum Garden / Edible Museum. Through her artistic activity, Andreja Kulunčić worked on the building of space for the development of social relationships, the progression of the community’s practices, and the empowerment of individuals with notions such as the collective, care, and reciprocity. The project Museum Garden / Edible Museum is a new production in the context of her work’s retrospective. As is common in Andreja’s work, the local context plays a key role in the production of new works. In this case, the artist seeks to build a social space which blurs the concept of internal and external museum, and to produce a space in which the neighbours and the visitors can experiment with new possibilities around the idea of the common good. This includes working with the architecture of the museum building and its potential, as well as the use of existing, previously unused platforms and terraces so as to create two gardens. One of them is within the museum, and the other one is the peripheral part of the edifice. Gardens are not only spaces for relaxation and socialising, but also places at which the act of gardening and tending to a shared garden, with both decorative and edible plants, creates collective responsibility. On the other hand, in this project, the museum performs the role of a social agent by becoming permeable, by creating connections with the neighbouring communities and communities by connecting the people, in the age of strong individualisation and alienation.

 

As part of the deliberation on self-organisation and self-education, the new sound artwork Meeting the Social Self will also be presented, formed as a series of dialogue fragments. This work responds to Andreja’s demand that the complex tissue of social relationships be immersed into. Through this work, the different levels of understanding sociality are researched: from compulsory observation and recognition of the manners in which sociality is constituted, learning of its configuration, all the way to a deeper awareness that all of us are an inevitable part of the social tissue. This tissue forms us, but we also in turn form it with our actions.

Furthermore, the project Creative Strategies will also encompass workshops on direct democracy for secondary school students, as well as discussions with workers and migrants in collaboration with the group Direct Democracy in Schools.

 

Discursive programme

The discursive part of the exhibition will encompass discussions referring to the topics that are closely related to the artist’s work and the projects she carried out (feminism, gender equality, trauma, migration). It is extremely important that the exhibition does not remain only within the gallery – the works by Andreja Kulunčić are socially engaged and participative, and the exhibition will reach its full potential only with the actualisation of these programmes.

 

Biography of the artist

In her works, visual artist Andreja Kulunčić (b. 1968) examines the different aspects of social relationships and social practice, with an interest in socially engaged topics, interaction with different audiences, and collaboration on collective projects. By establishing her own interdisciplinary networks, her artistic work becomes research, a process of collaboration, cocreation, and self-organisation. She often invites the audience to actively participate, and includes them in the “completion” of her works. The transdisciplinary approach, in which artistic skills are supplemented with those from other fields, is an important element of her practice. Andreja Kulunčić’s works are almost always made in collaboration with experts from different disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, design, programming, etc. In her projects, she processes the symptoms of contemporary society, from xenophobia all the way to depression, with special emphasis on the pressing issues of transitional and post-transitional environments. She frequently collaborates with marginalised groups and creates with them different platforms of expression and collaboration. She often transforms a gallery into a space for workshops and socialising, a kind of social laboratory whose results are felt in everyday life. By operating in marginal areas and by directing her critique towards central values of imaginary institutions of the globalising societies and the divisions conditioned by them, her artistic production suggests the ability of art to provide polemic foundations for the examining and unfolding of certain institutional forms and for constructing new ones.

 

Andreja Kulunčić graduated in sculpture from the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design in Belgrade in 1992. Between 1992 and 1994, she continued her studies at the Department of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. She is a member of HDLU since 1996. As of 2009, she works at the Department of New Media of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She cofounded the association Multidisciplinary Authorial Projects and Actions (MAPA) for art, science and technology, established in Zagreb in 2001. Her work has been presented at relevant international exhibitions, including Documenta 11 (Kassel), Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt), 8^th Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul), Liverpool Biennial 04 (Liverpool) and 10^th Triennale India (New Delhi), at group exhibitions at museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), PS1 (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), MUAC (Mexico City), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn), MSU (Zagreb), MG+MSUM (Ljubljana), Zacheta National Gallery (Warsaw), Garage Museum (Moscow), Lentos Kunstmuseum (Linz), Museum of Modern Art (Saint-Etienne) and Ludwig Múzeum (Budapest), and at solo exhibitions, including the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), Jorge Vargas Museum (Manila), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Rijeka), Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), Museo MADRE (Naples), Palazzo Clabassi (Udine), Art in General (New York), Artspace Visual Arts Centre (Sydney), Miroslav Kraljević Gallery (Zagreb), Nova Gallery (Zagreb), and Prozori Gallery (Zagreb). She received the following fellowships: MUAC & SOMA (Mexico City), Art in General (New York), University of Johannesburg (South Africa), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Artspace (Sydney), and as part of the 10^th Triennale India (Jaipur).

Website: http://www.andreja.info/

 

Exhibition production:

MSU Zagreb

 

Exhibition curator: Martina Munivrana

Concept authors: Andreja Kulunčić and Martina Munivrana

Curatorial research and collaboration: Irena Bekić (Croatia), Amanda de la Garza Mata (Mexico), Anca Verona Mihulet (Romania / South Korea), and Katharina Schlieben (Germany)

Design: Dejan Dragosavac Ruta

Exhibition architecture: Antun Sevšek and Damir Gamulin

Workshops and discursive programme coordinator: Renata Filčić

Producer: Morana Matković

 

The exhibition is actualised in collaboration with institutions and organisations in individual projects:

women.index – Zagreb City Museum (exhibition curator: Marina Perica Krapljanov)

Micro-Situations of Togetherness: Creating the Experience of Being Together – Art Pavilion in Zagreb (exhibition curator: Irena Bekić; project coordinator: Ivana Završki) and MAPA Association

You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It – made possible in collaboration with Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past, as part of the project (In)Visible Traces. Artistic Memories of the Cold War supported by the European Union through the Creative Europe[1] programme (project curators: Irena Bekić and Anca Verona Mihulet)

 

Intercultural Welcoming Programmes have been co-funded by the City of Zagreb.

 

 

The exhibition has been made possible with support from the Zagreb City Office for Culture and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

 

Exhibition Andreja Kulunčić: To Make the World a Better Place 
Museum of Contemporary Art, 15 May – 12 October 2025