Three awards of the eight T-HT nagrada @msu.hr contest were presented during the award presentation ceremony held on 10 April 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. 166 works were submitted to this year's contest, 34 of which were selected by the expert jury to be presented at the exhibition and to compete for the most prestigious purchase prizes in the current visual arts scene.
The jury primarily focused on excellence due to media diversity of the submitted works and participation of artists of different generations. The same principle was applied during the selection of prize winners. The jury was faced with a difficult task to select the best works and this year it comprised of: Snježana Pintarić - President of the Expert Committee, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and museum consultant, Leonida Kovač – the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb, Peter Kogler – a multimedia artist, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Igor Španjol – curator MG Ljubljana, and Leila Topić – curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Katarina Ivanišin Kardum won the first prize for her work entitled Still Landscape Series III and it was presented to her by Vesna Kusin, Deputy Mayor of the City of Zagreb. Lovro Artuković ranked second with two paintings entitled respectively Female Nude Musings and Second Artwork and the award was presented to him by Snježana Pintarić, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, while the third prize went to Borko Vukosav for his work entitled Lakes and the award was presented to him by Sanja Milinović, Director of the Go-to Market Department at T-HT.
The awards are purchase prizes in the following net amounts: the first prize is worth HRK 50,000, the second HRK 45,000 and the third prize HRK 40,000. The purchased works will become a part of the future T-HT@msu exhibition. The objective of the contest is to promote artistic work in the field of contemporary art in Croatia.
This project is of immense importance for HT, as it embodies all the key objectives of corporate social responsibility as we conceive it, pointed out Antonija Jergović, Acting Director of Corporate Communications at Hrvatski Telekom. “Art implies primarily creativity and innovation and those are precisely the core values and the prerequisites for both the present and the future of HT. Through participation in this project, we encourage creativity and innovativeness of the entire society and it will also have a significant impact on entrepreneurship. Hence we believe similar projects have significant cultural and business value”, stressed Antonija Jergović. The exhibition will be open until Sunday, 12 April 2015. Do not forget: this is a prize awarded by the public! You still have the opportunity to vote for your preferred artwork. The artist with the largest number of votes will be awarded HRK 10,000, while the luckiest visitor will receive Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 4 8'' LTE at the end of the exhibition.
About the prizes
1st prize – Katarina Ivanišin Kardum
Still Landscape Series III, 2014
Katarina Ivanišin Kardum’s work reveals half a century old diorama and points out the artificial nature of landscape through three-dimensional models of natural science. The artist re-actualises the fundamental idea of the tradition of Western art according to which art is considered an imitation of nature. Nevertheless, the aspects of imitation and cognition have not been separated, since transposition actually constitutes a rational model for the comprehension of nature. The production includes a technical aspect of reconstruction and construction and hence also manipulation. It is made possible primarily due to the fact that the artist is provided with a deep insight into the principal relationships and concepts. The hidden essence of nature paradoxically does not belong to the nature itself, since a natural occurrence is merely its impact which can be dislocated without major difficulties and transferred from one media into another. The idea behind the art of Katarina Ivanišin Kardum is the concept of nature which, through a construction of a model, creates its own dimension of learning and highlights the construction and conditionality of nature itself in cultural discourses.
(Igor Španjol)
2nd prize – Lovro Artuković
Female Nude Musings, 2015; Second Artwork, 2015
Lovro Artuković uses two miniature paintings in paradoxical relationship of simultaneous spatial and temporal distance and collision to re-semantise the fundamental postulates of history of Western painting, while focusing on the changing meaning of concepts of the real and realism. Through a procedure which can be compared with cinematic zooming in and out, the two canvases which depict an occurrence of materialisation of a meaningful body during the process of posing for the painting, disintegrate the central relationship – the one between the painter and the model. Simultaneously, the female nude becomes a musing picture and the painter becomes a body created in the process of exposure to the indifference of the look, which is precisely why the second piece of work entitled Second Artwork appears authentic.
(Leonida Kovač)
3rd prize – Borko Vukosav
Lakes, 2014
Borko Vukosav, a representative of a younger generation of artists, uses his cycle entitled Lakes, filmed in 2014 with an analogue photography camera, to connect documentary and directed photo shoot in a unique manner. His curiosity was aroused by a brick factory constructed in the 19th century which ceased operations in 1995. Borko’s photography camera filmed the handover of industrial architecture to the hands of nature; the forest hides the factory chimneys and the lake enters the former factory production facilities. Nevertheless, characters keep appearing in this post-apocalyptic landscape who bravely look into the artist’s camera. The scenes of post-industrial landscape, of an abandoned factory, are in sharp contrast with human characters posing for the artist. The “surplus” of characters in nature, which has been stressed by the camera, the incongruence between the landscape, the people and the footprints of human presence, create a certain tension, or a discomfort, which provides room for a vast array of interpretations of this awarded photography series.