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Exhibition The Horizon at the Spot Gallery

 

29th Nov – 17th Dec, 2021

 

 

The Spot Gallery and the Office for Photography invite you to the opening of artist Ana Mušćet’s exhibition The Horizon. The exhibition for the first time presents fragments of the artist’s three-year-long artistic research in the area of the Vukovar-Srijem County relating to the missing and captive persons during the Croatian War of Independence.

The exhibition opening will be held on Monday, 29th November, while the exhibition space will be open to visitors from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.    

 

The view stretches across the heart of the Pannonian Plain – Syrmia – freely and unhindered. Without restraint, it glides over the surfaces of the landscape, daringly penetrating the depths and confidently capturing distances, as if it had no beginning or end. An endless gaze, as eternal as the matter it conquers. In the landscape of the plains, the near and the faraway coexist, dispersing across static stretches of land, making the distant seem within reach. 

However, the all-encompassing gaze is only an illusion, because this is a territory of the invisible, the hidden, the vanished. The region has been inhabited since the Neolithic, yet it has been absorbing and storing sediments of the geological eras, as well as the fragments and remnants of human existence for eight millennia. In the latest war that occurred in this place, there are 1853 persons regarded as missing: the fates of 1455 of those are unknown, while the locations of the burial grounds of 398 people are still not known. 

 

The body of work entitled The Horizon starts from a specific landscape that functions as a silent archive of experiences and memory, a site where that which is gone is still constantly present. Taking the facts about the missing and forcefully detained persons during the Croatian War of Independence as its starting point, in a disorienting landscape containing sediment traces of individual and collective fates, The Horizon attempts to establish pointers signalling the way and open up the possibility of a different gaze, preparing the eye to see in a novel way, searching for that which eludes it, which is out of sight. Comprised of a series of photographic collages, The Horizon constructs, describes and creates a new form of viewing. Photographs – that often play a crucial role in the processes of documentation and identification –here form part of perception, imagination. They contain fractured scenes, full of cuts, but also connectors, lines that touch upon the unexpected. In the manner of a confidential witness, the photographs wait for their words to be interpreted, for their syntax to formulate, in order to encounter meanings therein, just as a void awaits to be filled with significance.   

 

Jelena Pašić 

 

Ana Mušćet (1981) graduated summa cum laude from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of professor Slavomir Dirnković, having obtained her master’s degree in Sculpture in 2016. She also earned a master’s degree in Croatian and Russian Studies from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She has won several scholarships for excellence, was an Essl Art Award finalist in 2015 and the recipient of a Special Rector’s Award for Distinction and two Dean’s Awards. For her work on Goli otok entitled A Change of Air, an expert jury headed by American artist Gery Hill awarded her the 2015 Freedom Award at the VII Passion for Freedom Festival in London. In 2015, she was the recipient of Dies Academicus, a recognition for special achievement of international importance. She was a scholarship holder of Dutch Women’s Education Fund. In 2016, she won the Grand Prix for her work Flags at the 25th Slavonian Biennale, and in 2017 the Audience Award at the same exhibition. In 2019, Mušćet received a recognition from the Adris Foundation in the category of Creativity. Her works are included in collections of contemporary art in the Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek, the Museum of Fine Arts in Split, and, since 2020, in the holdings of the Antun Augustinčić Gallery. She lives and works in Zagreb. 

 

Exhibiton authors:

Ana Mušćet

Jelena Pašić

OAZA 

 

This artistic research and exhibition have been supported by: 

 

Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia

City of Zagreb 

Families of Detained and Missing Croatian Veterans and Civilians Associations Union 

Vukovarske majke 

Croatian Association of Prisoners in Serbian Concentration Camps

Department of Forensic Medicine and Criminology, Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb

Directorate for Detained and Missing Persons, Ministry of Croatian Veterans

Directorate for Detained and Missing Persons, East Regional Office

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