News

Call for entries for the 28th slavonian biennial

The Organizing Committee of the Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek

issues a

CALL FOR ENTRIES

for the 28th Slavonian Biennial.

Slavonian Biennial is a juried group exhibition at which

contemporary visual art is presented,

chosen by the Jury composed of the following members:

Miško Šuvaković President,

Miran Blažek,

Olga Majcen Linn,

Darko Šimičić,

Valentina Radoš, Curator of the exhibition

 

New Paradigms of Happiness – from Osijek Dada to Contemporary Chaos

The exhibition is a starting point for stepping into the real life. Being among the life forms that seek, lose, find or produce new paradigms of happiness. The exhibition is a platform for gesture, activity, behavior – in the final instance – an entry to public life among people, casual passers-by, intentional interlocutors or unexpected partners as well as lost spooky figures wandering the city, passages, hallways, stairs and squares.

The task is “simple”: produce paradigms of happiness between two viral pandemic waves, at the time of another brutal European war, walking through spaces of local/global economic crises, revealing social autism, hidden paranoia and collective schizophrenia. Does it seem possible to find a new paradigm of happiness? If it is i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e to find it, then it should be produced in spite of psychoanalytic traumas, gaps in cognitive architectures and total ecological entropies.

The exhibition should initiate moving of objects, setting situations and performing events that anticipate, suggest or, perhaps, achieve the affect of happiness. Intensities to be felt physically. Intensities can be produced by any well-timed artistic action: new digital media, physical or behavioral performance outside or in public space, frozen or unfrozen photography, effects of neighborhood participation, appropriation of current or deleted historical traces, unexpected painterly shift, didactic or nondidactic lecture performance, accelerating differences or summoning spirits, namely, cultural tactical media. The exhibition should enable that any direct or suppressed fantasy is possible, realized and launched into the real world. Is happiness a face-to-face encounter with dizziness, hovering, slipping, shifting, mismatching, and challenging the world as a real-life scene on which a paradigm of new possible or impossible happiness is performed? A challenge!

In its history, the city of Osijek has had the signifier trigger, and that is the mythical narrative about the Osijek Dada. Launching images of aesthetic chaos and indexing or mapping surprising and accelerated – utterly transient – modernity. Dada is the starting point, but not the border or the horizon. Again and again happiness paradigms – despite unfavorable winds and storms – are to be discovered, performed, initiated, produced and opened in an exhibition that is a challenge for all of us!

Miško Šuvaković

 

The Slavonian Biennale is a juried exhibition that has been held at the Osijek Museum of Fine Arts since 1968. The mentioned fact confirms the seriousness of its tradition, while the calendar rhythm of it biennial occurence requires a clear starting point in the moment and a careful look into the future. The 28th edition of this event will be held mainly in 2022, a year specific for the pandemic threat seemingly overnight replaced by another war devastation on European soil. Recognizing global movements as a starting point in interpreting the title New Paradigm of Happiness, on the contrary, the subtitle on the other hand underlines the venue, the cultural and geopolitical origins of the Slavonian Biennale – From Osijek Dada to Contemporary Chaos. In August 1922, in the cinema of the former Hotel Royal in Kapucinska Street of our small town on the edge of Europe, a Dadaist matinee was held, having instantly connected the local cultural trends with the avant-garde aspirations of far larger communities. Today, as in the last century, it is necessary and expected to prove that art can and must be a binding agent in the communication systems of contamporariness. In a world where the absurd has become mainstream and reality irrevocably virtual, the question is how and where to find a new paradigm of happiness that we will strive for and that we will want to live by? This is also a question intended for artists who apply to participate in this exhibition.

Valentina Radoš

 

 

 CALL FOR ENTRIES AND SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR THE 28TH SLAVONIAN BIENNIAL

 

All entries must include the following:

  • personal information: first name, family name, date of birth, address, phone number, e-mail address;
  • professional résumé;
  • complete documentation on the submitted work, including the technical data about the display and making of the work (name, year, technique, dimensions, exhibitions to date);
  • high-resolution photograph or draft, and in the case of performance art a detailed synopsis is also required;
  • artist’s statement about the artwork

 

 

Authors may enter only one work. All submitted works must be exhibition-ready.

 

Only works created after 1 July 2020 may be entered. The competition is open for entries from its announcement until 30 September 2022. The exhibition shall take place at the Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek from December 2022 to February 2023.

 

Works must be entered in digital form. The Jury may ask for additional information or to see the work live. In addition to the selected works, works by artists invited to participate may also be included in the exhibition.

 

Entries, containing the required information, need to be sent by e-mail to:

biennale@mlu.hr

 

or call:

00385 31 – 251 280

00385 31 – 251 284

00385 91 522 1416

 

The entry is valid if it is received by e-mail before midnight of the deadline day.

Incomplete or late entries will not be considered.

 

Please see all other information and Rules for the Slavonian Biennial Exhibition at www.mlu.hr or follow us on https://www.facebook.com/mlu.osijek/

 

Visual identity of the 28th Slavonian Biennial: Igor Kuduz

 

Jury for the 28th Slavonian Biennial:

 

Miško Šuvaković (born in Belgrade in 1954) received a PhD degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1993. He was a Professor of Applied Aesthetics at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade (1996-2015). Since 2015 he has been a Professor of Applied Aesthetics at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade. He is the president of the IAA – International Association for Aesthetics (2019-2022). Šuvaković has written and edited 50 books that have been published in Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and English. He has been active as a curator from 1978 until today and conceptualized 40 exhibitions in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Maribor, Leipzig. He is engaged with the relationship between contemporary art, aesthetics and theory.

 

Miran Blažek was born in 1983 in Osijek. He has earned a BA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2006, and an MA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 2012. Soon after completing his degree, he started to enhance his work with practices that transcend the traditional concept of painting. In his work, he is drawn to border fields of the medium, primarily drawing and painting, and he engages in transposition – through action, material, or space itself. Blažek uses the experience of painting to develop various possibilities inherent in the nature of the medium. He has exhibited his works in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. In 2012 he has received the Radoslav Putar Award for best young artist under 35, awarded by the Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and in 2020 he received Vlastimir Kusik Award on 27th Slavonian Biennale. He took part in several artist residency programs abroad: Hafenkombinat/HDLU, Leipzig; CREART, Kristiansand; and International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York. In 2015 he founded the project of the International Student Biennial, an award exhibition for students and emerging artists.

 

Darko Šimičić was born in 1957 in Slavonski Brod. Lives and works in Zagreb. He is the co-founder and president of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute in Zagreb (2012), where he works as a program manager. Šimičić was a program manager at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art / Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb (1994-2006). He worked in the documentation department of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (2006-2009). He is a member of the Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

In the late 1970s, he began collecting a personal archive and creating a collection of works by contemporary Croatian artists. He has curated numerous exhibitions at home and abroad and wrote numerous texts and art reviews. He gave a series of lectures both nationally and internationally. His recent research is focused on historical avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s (Zenitism, Dada, Bauhaus, photomontages) and on groups and artists in Croatian art of the 1960s and 1970s (Tomislav Gotovac, Gorgona, Mangelos, Group of Six Authors). He was a member of the project team of the retrospective exhibition of Tomislav Gotovac (Rijeka, Usti nad Labem, Ljubljana, 2017-2018) and one of the editors of the books Tomislav Gotovac: Anticipator of the Crisis (Rijeka 2017) and Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment by Slobodan Šijan (Zagreb, 2018).

 

Olga Majcen Linn is a curator from Zagreb. She holds a PhD in art and media from FMK, Belgrade. She is the founder and curator of the association KONTEJNER | Bureau of Contemporary Art Practice, dedicated to progressive contemporary art that explores the role and meaning of science, technology and the body in society, focusing on relevant phenomena of today, with a special focus on provocative, fascinating and intriguing topics and phenomena as well as social taboos. Also, since 2003, she has been the head of the Zagreb VN Gallery, which is engaged in research, production, exhibition and representation of the domestic art scene of the younger generation. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, she teaches two subjects, Introduction to Art at the Crossroads with Science and Technology, and The Body and Corporeal Practices in Contemporary Art. She was a member of the Council for the Radoslav Putar Award, the selection committee of the Zagreb Salon 2016, the committee for the award of the 34th Youth Salon 2018, and the 35th Youth Salon 2020 and the expert jury for the Young Artist Award Golden Watermelon 3.0,4.0,5.0. She was a member of the Council of the International Triennial of New Media Art in Beijing (China), a member of the expert jury for the Accelerate Croatia Award, ARTS @ CERN, Geneva and a member of the expert jury of the EMAP platform, which annually awards production scholarships to outstanding European media artists and supports research production, presentation and distribution of media art in Europe and beyond. She is a member of the Association of Art Critics AICA and was a its Supervisory Board member in 2020.

 

Valentina Radoš is a curator employed at the Museum of Fine Arts where she manages the Collection of Paintings of the second half of the 20th century, (1945 to present), the Collection of Drawings and Graphics of the second half of the 20th century (1945 to present) and the New Media Collection (video, DVD, digital graphics, installations). Her professional interests include art practices of the 20th and the 21st centuries and visual communication. Since 2010 she has been curating the Slavonian biennial. Her recent curatorial projects are the 24th Slavonian biennial – Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller (2014 –2015); I was call you tomorrow – Krunoslav Stipeševič; (2015); the 25th Slavonian biennial – Borders of Visibility (2016 -2017), Ivan Faktor – A Film That Only I Watch, (2017.); Tarwuk – 20170621_141332 (2)., (2017 –2018); Ksenija Turčić – Iconophilia (2018); 26th Slavonian biennial – Flat Earth (2018 -2019); Davor Sanvincenti The Earth Shall Once be the Sun (20202), 27th Slavonian biennial – The Image as a Virus (MLU 2020.); East of Eden (MLU 2021.); How Fruk’s works continued living (MLU 2021.).

 

This post is also available in: Croatian