Exhibition history

Collection as a Verb

05.04.2022. - 31.12.2022. / MSU, 1. kat

The series of exhibitions with the joint title Collection as a Verb, which are created as a team effort, represent the new collection in duration of the Museum, so as to redefine its' concept and the social context in which it is situated. The title of the cycle is inspired by the poem “Freedom Is a Verb” by Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak. The exhibitions are not a finished project, but rather a process and swift reaction to the events around us. If we consider the collection a verb – an action, a state of being, or an occurrence – our team, together with the artists and the community, is a subject operating in time.

Davor Mezak: Disturbing Earthquake Reality

16.03.2022. - 01.05.2022. / MSU, Black Box

With his exhibition Disturbing Earthquake Reality, the multimedia artist Davor Mezak presents the current post-earthquake reality of urban and rural parts of Banovina. In the form of interviews, residents of Banovina present their personal experiences and the consequences of the earthquake on their everyday lives and work, while a series of photographs shows the consequences of the earthquake on residential and commercial buildings, as well as cultural and sacral goods. 

M 48° 15′ 24.13″ N, 14° 30′ 6.31″ E - Mauthausen: Redeeming/Erasing/Memory

11.01.2022. - 06.02.2022. / MSU galerija

In a multi-year research project entitled M 48° 15′ 24.13″ N, 14° 30′ 6.31″ E (Mauthausen's geographical coordinates), Austrian artist Marko Zink explores the trivialization of Nazi history, commemorative culture and the practice of erasing collective memory through expanded photography. It is a project that was originally realized in April 2019 for the Mauthausen Memorial where the artist exhibited photographic cycles aimed at making visible a double disappearance: the extermination of people and the eradication of memories. Selected works were exhibited at Michaela Stock Gallery in Vienna. Zink’s oeuvre there showed the seriousness of the approach to the topic and the complexity of artistic execution. These photographic cycles are premiered in Croatia at the MSU Gallery. The exhibition opens Jan. 11 at 6 p.m. Immediately after the opening of the exhibition, there will be a discussion on the experiences of commemorative practices with the participation of the director of the Mauthausen Memorial Barbara Glück, historian Ivo Goldstein,  the director of Jasenovac memorial Ivo Pejaković, head of the Documentation Center for Dealing with the Past Vesna Teršelič, artist Marko Zink and curator Leila Topić.

Barricading the Ice Sheets - A research endeavor by Oliver Ressler

30.11.2021. - 06.02.2022. / MSU, 3. kat

Barricading the Ice Sheets at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb is the first solo exhibition to encompass all of Oliver Ressler’s artistic production focused on climate breakdown. The 59 works exhibited span from 1994 to 2021, including films, video installations, photographic works, a three-channel slide installation, sculptures, banners, drawings and one painting.

Ana Hušman: A person without a house is homeless, what is a house without a person?

25.11.2021. - 30.01.2022. / Zbirka Richter

A house is a house. A home. A measure. An island. An experience. An inheritance. A loan. A property. A community. A life goal. An image that never existed, or one that suddenly disappears without a trace. But what is a house without a person? Still a house, it would seem. What is it that gets labelled, archived, conserved when someone’s private space becomes a museum? What connects the protocols of protection, touch and care in the case of a private house and a public institution? 

On-line exhibition and book: https://anahusman.net/sintart14/#

Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos: Documents of an Experiment

15.09.2021. - 16.10.2021. / Zbirka Richter

On the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of birth of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos (1921 – 1987), the exhibition Documents of an Experiment will be opened at the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection.

The exhibition’s title has been drawn from one of Mangelos’s works produced in the blackened catalogue of the group EXAT 51 – whose co-founder and member was also Richter – in which this artist expressed his attitude towards their 1953 exhibition at the Association of Architects, which he supported with his critical and theoretical work.

Ivan Kožarić: A Retrospective – One of 100 Possible Ones

01.07.2021. - 07.11.2021. / MSU, 2. i 3. kat

This retrospective exhibition, to mark the centenary of the birth of Ivan Kožarić (Petrinja, 10 June 1921 – Zagreb, 15 November 2020), is just one out of many possible ways to present the work of a completely uncharacteristic and thus exceptional artistic personality of recent Croatian and European art. From the very beginning of his journey in art he rejected the petrified art language of any recognized version of style and tirelessly sought for the best way to materialise his artistic thought – his idea. “If a work has an idea,” he said, “it has everything, it has life.” In this spirit, he took a stance of disagreeing – not only with the conventions of the profession or with any form of dogmatism – but also with himself, deciding just as firmly to start from scratch every day.

Instead of a fixed, forever completed aesthetic object, he supported the open work, the principle of processuality, which came to expression as an articulated artistic stand which he materialised in numerous processes, also including radical gestures of denying and annulling his own past in the name of what was yet to come. By reversing the system of values through the alchemy of transforming “rubbish into gold”, using strategies of recycling, appropriation, placing works in new constellations… Ivan Kožarić continuously kept alive issues about the nature and boundaries of art as something that is “ever elusive” and is “always something else”.

The oeuvre of this artist, who managed to be anachronistic and completely contemporary almost in parallel, sometimes even anticipating trends in art that were yet to happen, can be accurately summarized in the words “anarchical discontinuity”. This retrospective does not underline it by creating a new discontinuity, by reiterating what had taken place quite naturally and has been recognised as the main substance of Atelijer Kožarić – the place where it all began. The concept of this retrospective moves in the opposite direction, it is an attempt to present his work through the continuity of discontinuities – by establishing as precisely as possible the sequence of sudden changes that took place on that artistic path almost seventy years long.

Cinematographies of Resistance – Nicole Hewitt Women Minor Speculations, Sequence 5 (Mutations)

02.06.2021. - 15.09.2021. / MSU, Black Box

The project Cinematographies of Resistance lead by curators Dina Pokrajac and Leila Topić as a joint venture of Subversive Festival and Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb for three years running, presents film authors whose oeuvre emerges on the crossroads of contemporary art and film strategies and practices, combining the expressive possibilities inherent to art house film, essay film and openness to experimentation. 

Jarosław Kozłowski: Recycled News

01.06.2021. - 27.06.2021. / MSU galerija

On Tuesday, June 1, 2021, the exhibition Recycled News by Polish artist Jarosław Kozłowski opens at the MSU Gallery. At 6 pm Kozłowski will give a presentation: "On painting and politics.”

Recycled News is a long-term project by Jarosław Kozłowski that focuses on the policy and criticism of news media. The exhibition consists of hundreds of newspaper pages from different parts of the world, which the artist has painted over with watercolors. The exhibition spotlights the media and the differences between news and its presentation. News is most often recycled, and the speed with which information is spread is inversely proportional to its reliability.

Equilibrium by SofijaSilvia

19.03.2021. - 11.04.2021. / MSU galerija

SofijaSilvia has decided to name her exhibition Equilibrium, i.e. balance. Why Equilibrium? Because of the fact that the exhibited photographs, selected among her recent cycles such as Urban Animal (started in 2004), Pulsations (2015), About to Leave (2017), Dust to Dust (2018) or Sound of Water (2019) oppose the idea of a dualist division of our world into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. By choosing subject matters which defy the anthropocentric logic of the early 21^st century society, SofijaSilvia’s photographs underline the fact that the dimensions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ are irreversibly and permanently interwoven, and in their connection SofijaSilvia seeks balance.