25.4.2014
At the award ceremony held in the Museum of Contemporary Art, the award-winning works of art in the T-Tnagrada@msu.hr contest were presented for the seventh year in a row on 25 April 2014.
The winners were decided by a committee of experts comprising: Anne Barlow, curator and Executive Director of Art in General, NY; prof. dr. sc. Leonida Kovač, Academy of Fine Artis, Zagreb; Dalibor Martinis, multimedia artist; Toni Meštrović, audiovisual artist; Snježana Pintarić, president of the committee of experts, Director of MSU, senior curator; Igor Španjol, curator, modern Gallery, Ljubljana; Leila Topić, curator at MSU.
The first prize in the amount of HRK 50,000 went to Sandra Virtaljić for her installation Voljena; the second prize in the amount of HRK 45,000 went to Ivana Dražić Selmani for a series of drawing under the title Na Dančama; the third prize in the amount of HRK 40,000 went to the artistic pair Žižić/Kožul for their ambiental installation called 0,50.
The awards were presented to the winners by Maja Weber, Director of the Public Relations Department of HT, Vesna Kusin, Deputy Mayor of Zagreb and Vesna Bulatović, Assistant Minister in the Ministry of Culture.
About the Awarded Works
Voljena – the first prize, author Sandra Vitaljić
A photography installation Voljena, was coming to life in the period between 2011 and 2013. It is based on an long-lasting interdisciplinary research of structural violence that becomes non-perceptible thanks to the processes of normalization, that, among other areas also happen in the area of art and pop culture. This may be the reason why the artist, when photographing anatomic preparations in institutes for forensic medicine, uses the dramatic baroques chiaroscuro technique, and alludes to still nature that appeared as a stand-alone artistic genre in the baroque period. Her photography focuses on the cultural use, or, more precisely, aesthetization and discursive presentation of a dead female body as a consequence of a sexually motivated crime. She presents not only a photographic image, highly aesthetized massive object which literarily incorporates the photographic image with two identical faces, identical front and back. Photographic enlargement made in the format that corresponds to the life size of the captured object is imbedded, or to be more precise, compressed between two prisms of transparent, colorless Plexiglas. These objects seem to be floating, or they seem like a lighted score within a dramatic scene of a Tenebrist painting. The photographed organic substance stored in jar of formalin is a dead object that used to be a live human being. These are body parts that actually make the cause of the violent death visible, but put for the sake of the metaphor they are often eroticized in love songs. By bringing the look of the observers in the area of dissolution of the border between the wanted and creepy, the work of Sandra Vitaljić creates a stage where the non-perceptible causes of so-called black statistics are talked about in a critical manner.
Na Dančama – the second prize, author: Ivana Dražić Selmani
The work of art called Na Dančama was created in 2013. It is a series of drawings by which Ivana Dražić Selmani presents personal testimonies and turns family memories into a social event. The artist's drawing intervention removes the segments of daily life from the category of leisure time and family history and uses charcoal on paper to make the selected small scenes bigger then the specific moments they appeared in. In the context of global disasters, a cover letter from the beginning of the World War Two bears a message of the inexplicable lightness of being: bathing that cleanses all burdens that we have on our backs as individual. A carefree meditative preoccupation with the current situation outside the historical time represents the leitmotiv of the author’s work. The artist proves that melancholy is still a necessary companion of every innovative culture and a muse to the art threatened by extinction because of the constant lack of political ideas and visions in the time when a new cold war is approaching. A still memory intensifies and supports live family memories, and work, using the wisdom of time distance, replaces pathos and sentiment of the events, changes the deceptive experience of an individual and reveals the double nature of media.
0,50 – the third prize, authors: Žižić/Kožul
Ambiental installation 0,50 created ub 2014, by the artistic pair Žižić/Kožul.