In the fourth year of implementing the Possibilities project, we are presenting the exhibition Where Every Ordinary Activity Is Extraordinary by painter Marta Katavić. The Possibilities project was launched by the MSU curator Leila Topić in association with Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts with the aim of strengthening the exchange of knowledge and making new relationships between curators, artists and audience, making it easier for up-and-coming artists to remain in the professional field. The members of this year’s work group, which decided on the selection of artists in deliberative conversations and discussions, are Ivan Slipčević, Josip Zanki and Vlasta Žanić, professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, young independent curator Renata Šparada, and MSU curator and concept author Leila Topić.
Marta Katavić’s exhibition under the title Where Every Ordinary Thing Is Extraordinary includes oils on canvas, watercolours, photographs, a short humorous documentary film and many sketches made at the Mexico study tour of a few students and teachers from the Academy of Fine Arts. The aim of their journey was to explore and examine the colonial imagery about the Other and Otherness in the context of the western cultural construct. The project participants paid a visit to Mexico’s federal state of San Luis Potosi, its capital of the same name and the Wirikuta desert in Mexico, organising workshops and exhibitions, documenting and analysing artistic and ethnographic materials based on artistic research analysing the romantic obsession with ruins, the desert and Mexican pyramids. The programme was based on joint participative work of Zagreb and Mexican teachers and students.
Observing Marta Katavić’s sketches, photographs and paintings, it is evident that the focus of her visual interest is landscape, i.e. portraits of the local population. An important part of the appeal of Marta’s paintings stems from their inner tension. The formal language used by these pieces inscribes in them both a conflict both visceral and intellectual between assertive visual naturalism of the chosen themes, i.e. a careful avoidance of their egotisation and the openly painterly, occasionally almost abstract brush energy.
From a text by Renata Šparada:
Where Every Ordinary Activity Is Extraordinary
Juxtaposing the historical-colonial imperative for change and the rigid definition of culture she meets, artist Marta Katavić uses the research method of self-ethnography which assumes registering subjective experiences in a certain social context. Her works are made with different degrees of reflection, from an instantaneous immersion into new events, people and landscapes, to more expressive images made from a time distance.
The presented materials were created as part of the artistic research project Grand Tour II, mentored by professor Josip Zanki. The project critically approaches the Grand Tour historical tradition, the travels made by European (mainly British) aristocracy to southern and ‘exotic’ countries. Such travels served to educate based on the art seen and glorified the picturesque along with the inevitable colonial view of the local population. “They’re all peasants, you know,” is a phrase uttered by Eleanor Lavish in the film A Room with a View, directed by James Ivory, which illustrates the way the British upper classes perceived the local population of the countries they visited.
As part of the project, the artist goes to San Luis Potosi, the Wirikuta desert and Real de Catorce in Mexico, places marked by tourism, spiritual significance for the local population and interests of the mining industry. The author doesn’t directly address the cultural traits of Mexican society, but acts on the crossroads of her own and collective experience (comprised by the culture of the society she visits, as well as the common experiences of the group of artists she travels with).
Echoes of romantic tradition are best evidenced in the way the artist experiences unknown landscapes. The artist stops before the ‘expanse of the horizon’, the size and vastness not only of the desert, plant and animal world, but also of the experience of ancient civilisations’ ruins. Sublime sentiments inspired by the change of scenery thus mix with the real situation of her personal life in which travelling means a break in her routine and opening up to something new and different.
Project Possibilities for ’24 – Marta Katavić: Where Every Ordinary Activity Is Extraordinary
MSU Black Box 4 July – 18 August 2024
