Phony Smile. Language of Aesthetic Speculation in Croatian Photography

The exhibition will present the work of Edita Schubert (1947 – 2001), Željko Borčić (1942 – 2015), Petar Dabac (1942), Željko Jerman (1949 – 2006) and Vlado Martek (1951), one of the most prominent and prolific conceptual artists of the 1970s.

The curator, Sandra Križić Roban, prepared the exhibition, basing on the research made during the project “Forgotten Heritage. European Avant-garde Art On-line”. The radical questioning of art media, including photography, gained momentum in the 1970s and continued onward. It was then that the ontological questioning of the meaning of photography arose, together with practices that adopted the analytical approach to the medium, as well as those that focused on the transformation of a two-dimensional surface into a photographic object. It seems as though almost all existing tenets of photography were called into question. Under the auspices of the so-called New Art Practice, which radically transformed the paradigms of art, photography was examined beyond the constraints of its historical role of reproducing reality. By introducing a number of innovations in the understanding of this medium (in the formal, as well as conceptual and semantic sense), these authors inaugurated photography into a separate speculative-poetic system. Within such an “expanded field”, photography becomes a staging ground for rendering the very nature of art and artwork.

The exhibtion is available on-line and by appoitment since 17th of January 2021.

https://vimeo.com/493483275

Lecture Phony Smile. Language of Photographic Interpretation and Aesthetic Speculation by Sandra Križić Roban is available on-line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3Fvz-CKzQg&t=1386s

The exhibition supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, as part of the program conducted on the occasion of Croatia’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union.