Scenes from Zagreb: Artists' Publications of the New Art Practice

The New Art Practice was a term created for a generation of artists in the former Yugoslavia active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. These artists shifted their practice to spaces outside the traditional studio, onto city streets, into artist-run spaces, and in multimedia performances and experimental publications. Focusing on artists working in the city of Zagreb, this exhibition documents aspects of this shift and highlights the ability of artists' publications to record these often… Show more ephemeral gestures and ideas. While artists such as Goran Trbuljak, Braco Dimitrijević, Sanja Iveković, Mladen Stilinović, and Vlado Martek, among others, worked in a variety of mediums, they shared a common impulse to produce publications. These artists questioned and played with ideas about the place of an artist within this particular political and socioeconomic context. Their work often involved public participation and blurred traditional notions of authorship through collective activities, chance operations, and the appropriation of language and imagery from the state and commercial media. The materials in this installation resonate with other contemporaneous scenes in Eastern and Central Europe and with broader international trends, while also providing an insight into very local networks of experimental artists and writers in Zagreb.

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