Thirty-three years following the end of their collaboration, the artistic duo Darko Fritz and Željko Serdarević present themselves with the exhibition Divided Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, which brings together their joint artistic production consisting of fine artworks, the documentation of installations in public space, and music and stage performances.

The period of transition towards contemporaneity, which proceeded in the final two decades of the 20th century, took place outside of the set linear, chronological direction. Out of the defined influences, there arise artistic oeuvres which we can single out from the established national contexts, which correspond with their visual production to the definition of globality and its meaning. The position of art in contemporary times relies on the concept of cultural contemporaneity, which does not expand in one direction as a project of modernity, but rather develops towards the haphazard globality and the globality of art.[1] One of the certainly most important and interesting examples of artistic production from the late 1980s and early 1990s – which set up the canons of a new globality with its stratification, its “alternative,” i.e., new aesthetics, all the while escaping recognisable narratives – is the joint activity of the artistic duo Fritz and Serdarević within the framework of Zagreb’s fine art scene.

Their joint activity began in 1987 with the publishing of the programme brochure Cries and Whispers, with which this artistic duo heralded a three-year plan of collaboration in the field of fine art, design, and music and stage performances. Simultaneously, they were engaged in the actualisation of graphic and scenic designs for theatre and cultural institutions, authored under the name The Imitation of Life Studio.

The then young students reacted to the then strategy of developing new methods of contemporaneity – which they deemed insufficient – through the shared position “everything has already been shown, art is the establishment of new relationships between the existing forms,” and began exploring new alternative models of activity.

In 1988, they began the actualisation of a three-year plan of actions which they performed in various locations in Zagreb. Each of the three annual plans of “double performances” contained three music and stage performances and three exhibitions, held under different titles: Saltomortale, 1988; Contrary Motion, 1989; Interpunct, 1990. Through three design exhibitions, they presented their activity in the field of graphic and scenic design.

Their artistic actions were quite favourably received by the critique at the time. Through their artistic actions, they moved away from the exclusive concept of the gallery, considering that the aforementioned approach lacked a certain broadness that would enable the creation of an integral work.

In the concept of their activity, they constructed a hybrid space of performance which, alongside fine art and design, included music, film, performing arts and the performance, which they termed music and stage performance.

In the hybrid performative space of the music and stage performances, Fritz and Serdarević – who acted manifestly and programmatically, over a short duration period – were oriented towards connecting different media components, their interdependency, and mutual construction of new subjectivities. The music and stage performances consisted of programmes of film and hand-animated slideshows, accompanied by authorial compositions played live on the piano, while the electronic instrumental scores were on playback. The structure of the performance, i.e., of the event was always the same, the only difference being the music themes, the film and slide screenings, and spaces of performances.

By taking over the roles of pianist and projectionist, they welcomed their audience in men’s formal attire, in an artistically and sonically created (ambiented) performance space.

Following the compilation of audiovisual compositions, the performers left the performance space, leaving the machines to resume the playing of the audio and film screening (in a loop).

Aimed at the emotion of perception instead of primarily at the event, i.e., at the emotion itself, Fritz and Serdarević developed the aesthetics of nostalgia, within which the dramaturgy of action and its meaning dominated the form.

Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own phantasy, Svetlana Boym states in The Future of Nostalgia. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images – of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.[2] The one who is nostalgic feels suffocated within conventional limitations of time and space. Their performances are emotional, filled with dramatic turns, with different “iconographic elements taken from populist iconography and the mass media sphere.”[3]

In the alternation of different, intangible elements, while creating a space of new subjectivities, Fritz and Serdarević opened up with their music and stage performances the concept of hybrid cultural identities as unstable and fluid phaenomena that are alternately constructed and deconstructed in the “liminal field of disturbing reciprocity.”[4] Through a metaphoric determination of space, i.e., the inscription of the metaphor into the performance space as the site of life and experience, which also become manners of its signification, they enabled a better understanding of contextuality and a better approach to fundamental concepts related to penetrating the core of emotional meanings with questioning the identity, personal choices, and their uncertainties.

Alongside the music and stage performances, the artistic duo was also successful on the museum and gallery scene with which they sought to communicate. The entering into art institutions was begun in 1988, with the first design exhibition held at Nova Gallery; that same year, they received first prize at the 20^th Youth Salon. The scenic design they conceived for Branko Brezovec and the play Black Hole at the National Theatre in Bitola was pronounced best scenic design of the year, while curator Davor Matičević opened their first exhibition of mixed media works Photographs–Inventions at a small photo studio in Vlaška Street. The following year, at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and curated by Tihomir Milovac, they presented the exhibition Adapted for Screen, accompanied by a series of public installations in street artisanal showcases across the centre of Zagreb. The nine selected sites formed on the map a tri-square, a geometric form in shape of a Greek cross sans lower arm, which the artistic duo named themselves and applied in numerous design and fine art projects. The aforementioned action was titled Lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore (1989), while the title of the exhibition Adapted for Screen[5] referred to the method of processing the aforementioned cycle into flat photographic surfaces, with the help of which they were transferred from the street into the gallery in a 1:1 ratio. The aforementioned work became part of the holdings of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.

By toying with the techniques of collage, assemblage and readymade, Fritz and Serdarević developed their own fine art expression. In the exhibition brochure, Milovac states that their art is “contextually emotional, symbolically colloquial, technologically impoverished, albeit filled with dramatic psychoses.” The complexity and dispersion of their action, Milovac further states, the time, space, form, material and authorship are not categories according to which their work is processed, but rather a creative process which simply lasts.

Furthermore, the second annual design exhibition was organised as a pop-up exhibition in 1989 at ULUPUH Gallery, at which they presented posters executed in the silkscreen technique. Around the same time, they were invited by the Music Biennial to hold a concert with Alvin Lucier, and began a years-long collaboration with the Drama ensemble of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor under artistic direction of Tomaž Pandur, for whom they conceived visual identity and graphic design for a series of stage plays. The third annual design exhibition was held at the Isidor Kršnjavi Exhibition Salon, where theatre programmes and other smaller formats – designed for the needs of the Drama ensemble of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor and Zagreb’s SKUC – were represented in equal measure. By using found footage and prints, phototypesetting and hand-composed typography, they made visuals and posters by reproducing them “nearly beyond the point of recognition,” thereby converting information into image. Most of their posters was printed in silkscreen, and only a few in offset. As was stressed by Feđa Vukić: “The Imitation of Life Studio creates closer to art than to design.”[6]

The Imitation of Life Studio ended its joint activity with the retrospective Exhibition of Theatre Posters, which was hosted by Zagreb, Ljubljana, Split, Podgorica, Maribor, Skopje, Vienna and Moscow between 1990 and 1993.

The visual identity of the stage play Hamlet, directed by Tomaž Pandur, earned them in 1991 the award of Sarajevo’s MESS festival.

Despite a relatively short temporal duration, Cries and Whispers and The Imitation of Life Studio have left a powerful mark on Zagreb’s art scene, its protagonists and followers. With their joint activity, they strengthened certain moments of change which took place within the framework of globality, but also the transition between established forms and a new striving towards contemporaneity and new subjectivity.

Original and authentic, similar, but also different at the time of their duration, they spoke and communicated in the same language of a new aesthetics and visual and emotional perception of reality and own positions. Even though their influence is informally indicated the most in the field of graphic design, I believe that in the period in which they were active, but also afterwards, through toying with different elements and meanings, they opened up new spaces of visual communications, fine art, performance, identity, and multifaceted subjectivity.

In parallel with the exhibition Divided Time at the MSU and in the manner of the artistic duo's initial artistic activity, the exhibition of graphic design by The Imitation of Life Studio, entitled The Shape of Time and curated by Marko Golub, is also to be organised at the HDD (22 November), as well as the exhibition of the photographic angle of the activity of The Imitation of Life Studio / Cries and Whispers, entitled Good Prospects and curated by Sandra Križić Roban, to be held at Spot Gallery (15 November – 6 December).

Martina Munivrana

 

Darko Fritz (b. 1966) is a visual artist and freelance curator. He has presented his work at more than thirty solo and over a hundred group exhibitions worldwide, and was also active in the artistic groups The Imitation of Life Studio (Studio Imitacija Života, with Željko Serdarević, 1987–1991), Cathedral (Katedrala, 1988), Young Croatian Electronic Films (1991), and The Future State of Balkania (1999).

He critically observes the society-changing technology, while his work bridges the gap between contemporary art, media art and network culture, thereby taking over topics such as glitch and surveillance. Since the 1980s, he has been performing numerous installations in public spaces, and since 1994, he has included horticulture therein, which most often shapes content transferred from the digital domain. Since the 1980s, he has been creating video works and performing live audiovisual compositions using 'expanded film' techniques. As a member of the Cathedral project, he created a multimedia computer-generated interactive installation in 1988; since 1994, he has been creating artworks on the Internet. He presents multimedia works in gallery and museum exhibition spaces as well as at media, film and video festivals, and in public spaces.

The list of over a hundred exhibitions he has hitherto curated includes I Am Still Alive (digital art of the 1960s and the 1970s, and the recent low-tech and Internet art), Zagreb, 2000; CLUB.NL — Contemporary Art and Art Networks from the Netherlands (co-curated with Nienke Vijbrief and Ademir Arapović), Dubrovnik, 2000; bit international — [New] Tendencies — Computers and Visual Research, 1961–1973, Neue Galerie, Graz, 2007, and ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2008–2009; Angles and Intersections (co-curated with Nina Czegledy, Elena Rossi and Peter Dobrila, art director: Christiane Paul), MMSU, Rijeka, 2009; and Histories of Post-Digital, Akbank Sanat, Istanbul, 2014. In 2006, he initiated the association siva) (zona [grey) (area], as part of which he has curated more than 50 exhibitions. The research The Beginning of Digital Arts in the Netherlands (1955–1980), was awarded by the grant by Mondriaan Fund.

He authored the book Digital Art in Croatia (1968–1984), Technical Museum Nikola Tesla, Zagreb, 2021, and the eponymous exhibition in 2022, as well as the thematic segment Media Art for culturenet.hr, 2002. He co-edited (with M. Gattin, M. Rosen, and P. Weibel) the book A Little-Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ZKM, Karlsruhe / MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011. He is a member of professional organisations AICA, HDLU and HZSU, and an honorary member of ULUPUH.

www.darkofritz.net

Željko Serdarević was born in Split in 1965. Active on the theatre and music scene since the early 1980s, he started exhibiting in 1984 and established himself as a graphic designer as part of Studio Imitacija života (1987–1991). He has been publishing essays on design and related subjects since 1991. During the 1990s he worked on his own as a graphic designer for theatres, book publishers and advertising agencies, and in 2003 he established a joint practice with Dragan Mileusnić. They have since collaboratated on a wide range of graphic, web and video design projects. He has received awards at the Zagreb Salon, Zgraf and the Exhibition of Croatian Design.

https://serdarevic.eu/

 

Exhibition:

Exhibition curator: Martina Munivrana

Exhibition design: Darko Fritz

Graphic design: Željko Serdarević

Photo documentation: Rino Efendić, Boris Berc, Paula Court, Boris Cvjetanović, Ozren Drobnjak, Zoran Filipović, Ivan Posavec

Conservation and restoration: Mirta Pavić, Tomica Paradi, Leda Grabičanin

Technical setup: Ivan Tudek, Filip Zima, Aleksandar Milošević, Renato Mihaljenović

Proofreading: Dunja Aleraj Lončarić

English translation: Mirta Jurilj

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

Divided Time: Cries and Whispers / The Imitation of Life Studio 1987–1991