14.5.2018
Three awards were granted at the closing of the eleventh edition of the competition for HT award for the Croatian contemporary art during the ceremony held on 11 May 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
236 artworks were submitted for the competition, of which the Panel of Experts selected 36. They competed for the most prestigious purchase prizes for the recent visual artistic creation. The Panel of Experts comprised of Snježana Pintarić, M.Sc., President of the Expert Committee; Katrin Bucher Trantow, Chief Curator in Kunsthaus in Graz; Alenka Gregorič, Curator, Head of Mestna galerija Ljubljana and Galerija KC Tobačna 001; Alem Korkut, BA in Sculpture, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb; and Ivana Kancir, Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The laureates of the 11th edition of the competition are:
First prize HRK 75,000 – Vinko Vidmar: 17 November 2017, 2017
Video, colour, audio, 20’34”; camera and editing: Toni Balog
Anthropology is acquainted with a wide range of ancient purification rites. Using contemporary terminology, these are practices through which we free ourselves from traumas, both those from the past and the current ones. The video work by Vinko Vidmar originated against this backdrop. He cleans the shrapnels collected in his own yard and on the wall of the house that he grew up in. Through surgical precision unknown hands wash out these old remains that left scars: the first grenade fell on the car in front of the house, the second on the roof, and the third in the yard. There were casualties. Some wounds can never heal over time – one needs to resort to an archaic rite: cleaning everything that resulted from destruction and death, which means one needs to purify oneself from the accompanying negative emotions. Since 17 November 2017, when the video was recorded, a wide range of different opportunities presented themselves for Vinko Vidmar: he can pour dirty water into the yard and set off purified on a journey to the wide world, or he can be suffocating in the piled-up layers of the past. There is no doubt about what a young person will choose. The relationship towards the previous occurrences through a purification rite as a metaphor of the removal of layers inevitably brought about by time and changing shape was the aspect of this work that was primarily identified by the Panel of Experts as highly valuable. It was hence granted the first prize. It encourages us to carefully consider the goal that we intend to pursue in case we are not sure which direction to take.
Second prize HRK 45,000 – Dalibor Martinis: Gallery of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 1 April 1974 / a fragment, Data Recovery, 2018
Installation (model 1:1 the premises of what used to be the Gallery of Contemporary Art, walls made of drywall, white colour, chalk drawings)
The perseverance with which Dalibor Martinis has been "saving" our lost cultural history for decades has been awarded yet again. This can be compared with a situation in which an IT expert can never recover all your data after a computer crash. Similarly, Martinis cannot provide a whole, a unit, but needs to stick to fragments, which are associative enough to evoke the remembrance of the whole in the beholder.
The building of the former Gallery of Contemporary Art located in Zagreb Upper Town used to be a cult place for his generation, which turned out to be so only later on in time. Hence, in his well-known cycle entitled Data Recovery he decided to "save" the remembrance of an exhibition held in 1974, in which the French artist Daniel Buren applied a pattern of coloured lines taken over from his graphic artwork around the door frames of the exhibition venue. Hence, Martinis reminds us yet again of the importance of the preservation of some information, whilst simultaneously addressing the issue of whether partly lost or destroyed data can be recovered at all. Through putting together personal records, photographs, catalogues, and different documents, Martinis in fragments creates the former ambience, a reconstruction of the physical premises of the institution and a piece of art during its development. Considering the fact that this multi-annual project of the artist, under the name Data Recovery contributed to the raising of awareness about the importance of data maintenance or the dilemma concerning the maintenance of partly lost or destroyed information, the Expert Committee decided to grant him the second prize.
Third prize HRK 40,000 – Vedran Perkov: Interferences, 2016
Video installation, changing dimensions
During the time when TV sets used to be analogue and black and white, a programme interruption used to result in flickering white dots that appeared on the screen, which irritated the viewers. In the digital age white dots do not appear on screens anymore, but now we are flooded with information. Actually, the viewers are yet again in the state of "white noise", even though they may be unaware of it. Vedran Perkov transformed the text of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights into a binary code and subsequently replaced it with black and white squares – interferences. Consequently, the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights becomes a technical element, a visual stimulus or even an irritation, since the personal aspect has disappeared and so has the difference between good and evil, morality and crime, amongst others. Against a backdrop of information that is continuously poured into our consciousness, we tend to ignore and overlook what is crucial, whilst thousands of photographs that our eyes catch a glimpse of merge into black, impersonal squares which do not reach our emotions. Someone appears on a daily basis who claim to ardently pursue universal human rights, yet these are frequently only empty words – phrases and quotes – that we may find only abstract notions that concern someone else, someone we cannot relate to at all. The power of the work by Vedran Perkov is in the fact that it makes us stop and wonder: what can I do today and in this very moment to make this world a better place, and so the Expert Committee decided to grant him the third prize.
Vinko Vidmar was presented the first prize by the Mayor’s envoy, Mr. Veljko Mihalić, Head of the Department for Museum, Visual Art and Library Activities at the City Office for Culture. Dalibor Martinis was presented the second prize by Nina Išek Međugorac, Director of Corporate Communications at HT. His stepdaughter Ivana Jozić accepted the prize on behalf of the artist. The third prize was given to Vedran Perkov by Snježana Pintarić, President of the Expert Committee and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.