Expert jury: Silva Abramović, Anita Miloš, Luka Radica, Darko Škrobonja (artists) and Branko Franceschi (museum representative); after the evaluation of submitted applications, selected:
Duje Matetić i Mirela Plenković (Split)
Michel Mesarić i Mia Krneta (Rijeka)
Eva Erceg i Anja Tomljenović (Zagreb)
Viktorija Križanović i Marija Škegro (Osijek)
Mirela Plenković about Duje Matetić
“The Vanishing City” is a video installation by Duje Matetić, in which the artist problematizes the correlation between the historical centre of Split and the shopping mall situated at the city margins. The title refers to the last series of paintings by Emanuel Vidović, “Vanishing Split” – the artist’s intimate reminiscences to his home city, which seem like fragile visions and evoke the atmosphere of bygone times. Matetić is likewise interested in the phenomenon of the evasive dimension of space-time, but in the contemporary context, where the once prominent places in the city have lost their attraction to the new ones as a result of consumerism in the modern society.
Mia Krneta about Michel Mesarić
RGB song is an audio-video installation that visually presents sound by using abstract light recordings. Since the artist has both musical and visual training, his artwork is a fusion of experiments with the frequencies of sound and light or colours. In the wake of the current trends of merging art, science, and technology, Mesarić begins his experiment by exploring sound. In a complex system of modern analogue and digital technologies for sound reproduction and recording, the artist experiments with frequencies, intensity, duration, and colours of musical tones.
Anja Tomljenović about Eva Herceg
We all go through some form of initiation. Independently of the historical period, it is imposed by a series of socially determined frameworks, such as education or religion in the earlier phases of our lives, and profession, marriage, or other human interrelations later on. It is this topic that sculptor Eva Herceg has related to her own experience of studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and sculpted it into a motive behind her graduation work. Its starting premise has been to directly include a number of persons into the creation of her artwork and therefore the artist used crowdsourcing to collect the materials – cardboard boxes for eggs, which are soaked, drained, mixed with glue, kneaded into a dense paste, and shaped into the characteristic form of an eggshell.
Marija Škegro about Viktorija Križanović
John Cage once said: There is no such thing as silence. Field Recordings is an artwork by Viktorija Križanović, student at the Art Academy in Osijek, and is conceptually divided into three parts: it consists of twelve graphic prints titled Field Recordings and the corresponding 24 Scores for Three Voices – compositions and audio recordings of a performance following the graphic annotation. This conceptual artwork seeks to answer some simple questions: How can we transform into sound something that has no voice? How can we give a possibility of expression to a living element? Owing to her alternative way of visually documenting places, which is almost a site-specific performance, the artist’s graphic prints show the actual state of nature in a particular time interval, while her vocal composition is actually an interpretation, an attempt to answer the question she raises.