ART (TO) NEIGHBORHOOD: TREŠNJEVKA WORKS BY BOŽENA KONČIĆ BADURINA, MARKO TADIĆ AND ANA KUZMANIĆ

SALON GALIĆ, MARMONTOVA 3, SPLIT

JANUARY 25 – FEBRUARY 12,  2024

ORGANIZED BY: HULU Split

CURATED BY: Ana Kutleša / BLOK

OPENING: Thursday, January 25, 2024 at 7 p.m.

An unusual structure filled the space of Salon Galić from floor to ceiling; a prototype of something that looks like a skyscraper, which would surely tumble down in an earthquake. More attentive eyes will soon perceive that this structure represents housing spaces piled onto one another, according to some other, non-construction logic. It is the logic of life, getting on in a neighborhood, more precisely, looking for a roof over the head of a Trešnjevka worker and a trade unionist Jadranka Klekar. In her work, “Jadranka’s First Life”, Božena Končić Badurina reconstructs the life story of this woman from the 1950’ to the early 2000s’in several fragmented sequences. At moments, it seems that they could belong to another Jadranka, another worker, in any neighborhood in Zagreb or Split. (...)

And while economic and social transformations in Jadranka’s first life are seen through the prism of a personal life story, ''Fleeting Form'' by Marko Tadić looks at Trešnjevka ‘s constant change through its physical manifestation. (...)  As the first work created within the “ Living Heritage“ project, animation and a series of objects ''Fleeting form'' is based on drawings by Matija Pokrivka, a journalist from Trešnjevka, and on photographs of the flood that struck Zagreb in 1964. (...) In his interventions that recall, among others, the heritage of Andrija Mutnjaković, utopian architecture, the Zagreb School of Animated Film and its Professor Balthazar, Tadić proposes, instead of a clear narrative line, loose associations and automatized drawing that follows an internal logic. A flooded city turns into a construction site: instead of a city under water into a city on water. (...)

If Tadić was inspired by Trešnjevka as a built landscape that is constantly changing, and Končić Badurina by a life story as a prism for observing wider social transformations, Ana Kuzmanić looks from a completely different perspective, but still focusing on the change.  For her work, “Wild Growth”, Kuzmanić explored abandoned land sites in Trešnjevka, lots between demolition and construction, where she found over 100 different species of self-seeding plants. (...)  In the story in which it is difficult to determine which is the background for what, the perspective becomes distorted, moving from the human to the vegetal and even broader – the temporal one. The cycles cease being one life, one event, one century, and instead have become a long duration of the vegetal world, which has no beginning and no end. This weed will live – thus Luka Bekavac concludes his “Wild Growth”, an atypical short story, inspired by Ana Kuzmanić’s work, and the homonymous book connecting these two authors, the first publication in the newly launched Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum book series, is exhibited as well. 

From research, to direct work with the local community, to references to different social spheres, to exhibitions and publication, three artists with whom we have started the Living Heritage program, revived, each in their specific way, Trešnjevka’s heritage. In the neighborhood, with the neighborhood, for the neighborhood, their works are a living proof that heritage is not only destined to serve commercial trends for the capitalist profit or/and dancing in the rhythm of national pride.

ANA KUTLEŠA 

SALON GALIĆ WORKING HOURS:

MONDY - FRIDAY: 10 A.M. – 1 P.M. AND 4 P.M. – 8 P.M.

SATURDAY: 10 A.M. – 1 P.M.  

VISUAL: "Wild Growth" by Ana Kuzmanić

BAZA’S ANNUAL PROGRAM FOR 2024 IS SUPPORTED BY THE "KULTURA NOVA" FOUNDATION.