Kata Mijatović / Works 2014 - 1997
Kata Mijatović is multimedia artist. She was born in 1956 in Branjina, Croatia. In 1981 she graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. From 1988-1991 she is member of the art group Swamp /Baranja. From 1991-1993 she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence. In 1997 she graduated painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. Since 2005 she runs AŽ Gallery at Artistic organisation Žitnjak Ateliers, Zagreb. Since 2007 she is member of the art group PLEH. She represent Croatia at 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia/2013, with the project Between the Sky and the Earth /curated by Branko Franceschi/. She lives and works in Zagreb. The reconsideration of the complex relationship between the conscious and unconscious, between the visible outside world and the invisible inner mental spaces is the main topic of Kata Mijatović,s artistic preocupation. The starting point always is the dichotomy between two psychic spaces, the conscious and unconscious, their interaction and the possibility or impossibility of their mutual communication. A particular segment within the framework of these research consists of works / projects with dreams, where the dreams are a basic structural template and motivating content. Dealing with the dream phenomenon, these works problematize the perception of reality in relations conscious-unconscious, and explore the function of the unconscious in the construction of reality.
The Girls Choir/Dubrovnik, performance, The City is Dead, Long Live the City, urban festival, Dubrovnik /2014 Screaming of the young girls in the performance The Girls Choir/ Dubrovnik, is in function of energy cleaning and confirmation that city is alive: above all, screaming evokes 'awakening'. For those who are performing it, screaming is primary expression that occurs at the edges of the language and releases body's and mind's energy flow. In order to awake absolute attention similar procedures were used by Zen teachers (for example punch with a stick suddenly and for no reason during teaching). In similar way, screaming causes immediate and maximum attention, maximum vigilance and focus on here and now. Implemented in specific public space of the city, screaming is at the same time, a cry of rebellion, and of non consenting.
Resume, performace, Industrial Art Biennal, I.A.B., Labin, 2014 The performance is reinterpretation of Kata Mijatović’s dream from 1991 of bringing coal out of a mine as the resume’ abstract of her dealings with dreams. The account of the dream: I go down to the abandoned mine where a heap of coal and a wheel-barrow waits for me. I load coal into the wheel-barrow and bring it out into daylight. In performance artist shift coal in a wheel-barrow from one to the other side of a stage. The same action is repeated in video projection. The soundtrack at the end of performance is True Faith by New Order. Previus realization: Resume, MM Centre, 2007, Zagreb
To Be, video instalation, Gallery 60-90-60, Zagreb, 2013 The exhibition starts from assumption that the house/home, where we all live during our existence, in fact, is life that is given to us, life in which we exist. In metaphysical sense, our lives (throught our bodies) function as 'houses' in which we have moved in, when we had been born, and we leave them when we die. The video installation To be consists of two conected rectangles. The rectangle of salt, set up on ground where are placed simplified models of black houses made of styrofoa, and projection of the same situation taken from above from bird's eye view, placed on the wall. Situation on the ground 'moves' in projection on the wall and in that way emphasizes the view at the existence, the view at life which is basically the projection of our existence, or what we can see from our homes/lives. The installation is accompanied by the song Homeway, composed by noise-pop girl band Leave, which acted in early 90s in Osijek. Nostalgic song Homeway talks about home in war-time, from the perspective of 'leaving or staying', and brings an emotional breakthrough in cold black and white installation's construction.
Between the Sky and the Earth, multimedia installation, Museum of Contemprary Art of Republic Srpska, Banja Luka/2014 After representing Republic of Croatia at the 55th Venice Biennale, Kata Mijatović’s project Between the Sky and the Earth, are presented at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb/ 2014, and at the Museum of Contemprary Art of Republic Srpska, Banja Luka/2014. Project and exhibition are curated by Branko Franceschi. Every civilisation from the beginning of times considered that dreams, as manifest form of unconscious function of mind, were a phenomenon indicating that reality is not as real as we may think. This is exactly what the famous saying by Zhuangzi, follower of Lao Tse from the 6th century BC is about: “Am I a man who dreamt that he was a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming about being a man?” Dreams indicate how problematic is the concept of perceptive projection of reality after which the reality is equated with its sensory perception. They also contribute to the argumentation adhering to the definition of reality as a mere projection of our minds. In the civilisation of today perception of time and space have completely changed. We increasingly co-exist in virtual worlds that we produce using technology while forgetting that already at our own, organic level we have the innate ability to create virtual worlds – this is exactly what our unconscious does in our dreams. The phenomenon of dream problematises our perception and conception of reality and because of the aforementioned changes it is more important to become aware of it today than ever before. /Branko Franceschi, from the exhibition catalogue/
Between the Sky and the Eart, multimedia installation, Art Pavilion in Zagreb/ 2014
Between the Sky and the Earth, exhibition wiev, Croatian Pavilion on 55th Venice Biennale, Sala Tiziano, Venice, 2013
The project Between the Sky and the Earth, presented at 55th Venice Biennale, is conceived as an ambiental installation that brings together Dream Archive - an interactive web portal as a central work of the project, with artist's video works and documentation of performances realized during 20 years of her work on the theme of the complex relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, and, as well as, with site and context specific performance and video Unconscious: Canal Grande.
Between the Sky and the Earth, exhibition wiev, Croatian Pavilion on 55th Venice Biennale, Sala Tiziano, Venice, 2013
Dream Archive, interactive web portal, www.arhivsnova.hr , 2013
Dream Archive /http://arhivsnova.hr/ is a domain where visitors can place/archive their dreams. The project was realised as the central work of the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth, presented at 55 Biennale di Venezia /Croatian Pavillion /2013. So far, more than 2000 dreams in different languages have been collected in the Dream Archive. The inclusion of a large number of participants create a global 'pool' of dreams; open a space to explore the phenomenon of dreams, and what it is that people dream about today. Dream Archive ask questions to which we still don't have the answers - why do people dream, and what is the function of the unconscious in the construction of reality. Despite all the paradoxes in wich we live, today's world is functioning increasingly as a multiplied, pre-agreed construction of the conscious 'self'. This dominant model of experience of reality, and constructing the reality, is a ready-made blueprint that we are born into. Images of the world, which the conscious self emits today with increasing speed, most often serve purely to maintain or add to these constructions. Our understanding of the world basically do not include the knowledge and the power of the psychological spacies behind the conscious self /among wich is particulary emphasized uncoscious/ nor its help in the personal discovery of the mystery of existence on a universal level. Our civilization defines the psychic space of the unconscious solely as a space of supression. At the same time this 'internal' spaces, defines us as the human beings much more than we are ready to acknowledge. We spend nearly half our lives asleep, in the unconscious, a fact which - for whatever reason - we refuse to address. And yet the systems of mass control, such as political and media manipulation, can only be avoided in sleep - sometimes we are truly 'awakened' only in dreams.Thus the unconscious, primarily in our dreams, becomes one of the last oases of the internal and private that can still offer some resistance to the 'agreed' picture of the world.
Unconscious: Canal Grande, video, 45', 2013
Video Unconscious: Canal Grande was commissioned and premiered within the Between the Sky and the Earth project that represented Croatia at the 55th Venice Biennale. Video captures white gondola’s voyage through the canals of Venice at dawn. Artist is sleeping inside gondola covered with white bed linen, gondolier is dressed in black. The video is continuation of the 2010 performance Sleeping Between Sky and Earth, when artist slept one night in Ivan Kozaric’s 1965 Shape of Spaces sculpture installed on the terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The shape and white color of gondola resemble the form of the sculpture which itself evokes the form of the cradle. In both performances the emphasis is on sleeping that takes us into the unconscious state of mind which essentially defines us as human being. Water is sublimation of the unconscious, and Venice immersed in water becomes the City of Unconscious. White gondola and sleeping artist contrasted with gondolier dressed in black represent the duality of black and white, day and night, conscious and unconscious, often used in artist’s works. The video also refers to the symbolist paintings of Arnold Böcklin and others which often depict motive of voyage in the boat as a metaphor for the transition into the worlds beyond.
Božena’s Dream / Wipers, 2011, video, 11’ 30’’, Galženica Gallery, Zagreb
Božena’s Dream / Wipers video is inspired by the text of the dream published in Selected Dreams - a collection of recorded dreams written by my friends and acquaintances, which I have been accumulating from 2001 onwards. The process of recalling of dreams in the video was used both as the content and the structural framework, similarly as in the series of works that primarily dealt with the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious or the translation of the subconscious into the conscious. Božena’s Dream / Wipers is based on the recollection of the dream by the Croatian artist Božena Končić Badurina focused on the experience of dying and thoughts of death. The video is recorded in a static frame from the inside of a car, focusing on the wipers removing the watercascading down the windshield. The text of Božena’s dream appears repeatedly only to disappear completely by the end of the video. Video footage functions as a membrane on which the text of the dream is written and therefore it becomes essential to the meaning of the work.
Vlasta’s Dream / Crowd, 2011, video, 20’ 09’’, Galženica Gallery
Vlasta’s Dream / Crowd video is inspired by the text of the dream published in Selected Dreams - a collection of dream records written by my friends and acquaintances, which I have been accumulating from 2001 onwards. Video is based on the text of the dream by Croatian artist Vlasta Žanić. Similar to the video Božena’s Dream / Wipers, experience of dying and thoughts on death are the focal point of the dream. The background for Vlasta’s Dream / Crowd is an everyday scene on Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, taken from bird’s eye view and presenting bustle of people, arrivals and departures of trams. Text of Vlasta’s dream appears repeatedly only to disappear completely by the end of the video. Video footage functions as a membrane on which the text of dream is written becoming therefore essential to the meaning of the work. The membrane looks as if permeable, so that the recorded reality absorbs the atmosphere of a dream, the same way the dream, thanks to the video footage in the background, loses its personal, (private)reasons and takes on the characteristics of an enigmatic universal message.
Dreams from the Underpass, 2011, video, 22’, GalŞenica Gallery
Video is filmed in one of the pedestrian underpasses in Zagreb. The static camera captures people coming and going through the underpass. Eleven recollections of dreams by artist’s friends are written over the video-recording, appearing and disappearing consecutively by the end of the video. Video footage functions as a membrane on which the text of dream is written and therefore it is essential to the meaning of the work. The membrane looks as if permeable, so that the recorded reality absorbs the atmosphere of a dream, the same way the dream, thanks to the video footage in the background, lose its personal and private reasons and take on the characteristics of the enigmatic universal message.
Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, performance, 2010, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
This is a performed intervention on (in) the sculpture of the Croatian artist Ivan Kožarić Form of Space, displayed in the inner court of the MSU. The intervention consists of spending the night inside the sculpture using the pillow, bed sheet and comforter. The work is accompanied by six-hour long video documentation. The performance is inspired by Ivan Kožarić' definition of sculpture as a 'form of space' realized through the relationship between two basic elements heaven and earth. To follow this definition, spending the night inside the Kozaric sculpture (which does look like a elegant luxurious couch) goes beyond the physical dimension of the performance. It advances the idea of a privileged stay in the immaterial, universal world of Kožarić' art, and in the art generally speaking. The choice of spending the night as the form of being within the 'form of space' is also motivated by my former projects dealing with dreams. They start with the idea (simply said), that life is but a dream between heaven and earth, while sleep, in the context of the work represents a metaphor for our stay here on earth.
The Drive, 2011, three channel video, 27’, The Look of Resistance Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb The video presents panoramic view recorded in a static frame through the window during bus drive from Zagreb to Osijek. Camera records a winter landscape of the Slavonia’s flatlands , nearby the city of Slavonski Brod. During the drive the words taken from the 2002 online work The Dream Net (www.g-mk.hr/online/dreams) appear and disappear on the window glass. The Dream Net is an interconnected labyrinthlike structure made of 30 dreams I dreamt and wrote down from 1991 onwards. Hypertext marking the key words enable navigation by keypress through the net, linking one dream to the other. These words are: water, mother, to get down, to solve a problem, coal, snow…. In The Drive the words appear and disappear on the snowy bus window, as on a membrane between physical movements through the real spacetime and parallel symbolic movements within psychological space of dreams.
Bus KneĹževo-Osijek, 2010, video-performance, Dopust Performance Festival, Zagreb
Soaked in water and covered with the projection of video recording of the bus drive through Baranja region, I brushed a part of the screening wall, followed by my recitation of the names of the villages through which bus passes by. The performance is a dedication to Baranja’s remote villages that nowdays are slowly disappearing from the geographical map.
Baranja by Bus, 2009, video, 12’
Video is filmed with digital camera during a bus ride through Baranja region. The recording captures an unusual vista seen through the bus window in which the water is accumulated between the glass panes up to half of its height. During the ride, the water level oscillates creating a moveable line at the eye level that follows the landscape. The line is made apparent thanks to the agitation of the water caused by the bus movements. The recorded surreal water filter submerges the melancholy Baranja landscape into a vacillating aquatic space that recalls the Sea of Pannonia, Baranja’s prehistoric predecessor.
Kato!, 2010, video, 14’
Several of my friends are standing in front of the static camera pronouncing my name in the form of beckoning: Kato! Video presents an unsuccessful attempt to communicate between the ‘actual self’ and the ‘lost self’.
Crying Out, 2010, video installation, Gliptoteka HAZU, Zagreb
Crying Out is a continuation of the series of works in which I set off the communication relationship between the two opposed psychological spaces, the conscious, rational, outward directed, with the unconscious, irrational, inward directed. In a single-frame video recording I cry out myself, exclaiming my name in uneven time intervals and intonation, standing at the entrance of the dimmed, undescriptive room. I am referring to the life situations in which we remain trapped within the excessive rational constructs of ego, our constant hurriedness, and attachment to the visible realm. Simultaneously we are losing the connection with other psychological spaces which possess the essential knowledge about us and the world we exist in, and that are inaccessible to our conscious, logical, and rational selves.
Lack of Response, 2007, audio installation, Moria Gallery, Starigrad
The work consists of audio recording of me calling out my own name (Kata) in a different time intervals, and with uneven intonation. The audio recording was installed inside the pool with ancient stone mosaic in Moria Gallery Starigrad.
Graffito from Florence, 2009, performance-installation, Temple exhibition, Prsten Gallery, HDLU, Zagreb
During the entire duration of the exhibition, every day I would rewrite the sentence Il dio c’e / The God exists, in water using a paintbrush on the freestanding wall in the Gallery. The sentence remained visible on the wall for a certain interval of time, and then slowly evaporated. The work is interpretation by the graphite statement Il dio c’e written on the dwelling house façade in Florence, which I faced almost every day during my stay in the city between 1991 and 1993. Water, here the material of the execution, in comparison with the air we breathe signifies the other state of consciousness, the one which cannot be lived in, but only visited, just like the sea depth is visited by divers. At the same time water appears wherever and whenever there is a life. To write Il dio c’e everyday with water aims to confirm that statement everyday and at the same time, to stage its’ repeated disappearing.
Two Dreams, 2009, public space action, Performance Days, Osijek
Two young girls dressed in black and white T-shirts with inscriptions: Markita’s dream or Snježana’s dream, were handing out leaflets with dreams by Markita Franulić and Snježana Klarić, at different public spaces in the city of Osijek. Texts of dreams are printed on A5 black or white paper. Both dreams converse the experience of death in an unusually corresponding way as though they are surpassing dreamers’ personality and as though they are sending us the announcement about what the death as mutual experience of all the living beings is actually alike. By handing out the leaflets (which we usually connect with selling and buying activities, and which are usually handed out by young girls), the contrast between so-called everydays triviality of life and the deep and cognitive nocturne experience of dreaming is emphasized.
Choir, 2009, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
A group of about thirty girl students from The Fifth Grammar School of Zagreb performed single ten seconds long group screams at the various locations in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, on the occasion of its opening. Screaming of young girls in the Choir performance to me compares to a sudden breakthrough of the light crying out for awareness and focusing on here and now. I also consider it a scream of rebellion, nonconsent to conventions. The teachers in Zen Buddhism use similar procedures to arise the absolute attention of their students and release the body and mind energy flows e.g. during teaching striking a student on his back by a club suddenly and without any provocation. I also believe that the magical energy of woman’s scream created energetic initiation and purification of the newly opened MSU galleries.
Screaming, 2009, multimedia installation, PM Gallery, Zagreb Six videos are projected on six LCD monitors deployed in the space. Each video presents a different group of pre-school children filmed in single, static frame. Children are standing next to each other and screaming a few seconds without restraint. Volume of the sound is mollified to the level of murmur, but in irregular intervals the space is stirred by their loud joint scream played on the compact disc. The scream is a primary expression, a primordial fact, communication that goes on at the edges of language. If language belongs to the field of identification, for only within it the meanings are created, a scream then reflects a state beyond destiny and stereotypes. Children screaming here signify an expression of existence before belonging, an uninhibited expression of being, liberated from the established standards and determinations.
Luka and Matej from Branjin Vrh, 2009, video, 6
The video is recorded by a photographic camera, in a home video style. Two boys (my nephews from Baranja region) are screaming in front of camera in their unrestrained childish exuberance. I consider these screams as a pure joy of being, completely opposite to the iconic 1895 Scream by Edvard Munch’s, which is universally interpreted as reflection of human suffering and anxiety. It is important to mention that boys were born after the last war in Croatia. Luka and Matej are new humans who did not experience the war; they are looking to place themselves. In their Biblical names, in their screaming - they are heralds of the new.
Visible / Invisible, 2007, video installation, Barrel Gallery, Zagreb
The dream about the boy with golden eyes is one of my dreams from 1991. In the video, the text of this dream iteratively appears and disappears from the video recording of a Sunday ride on the tram. The work creates relation between the two aspects of the world, two parallel realities; one of them being everyday, banal, visible like tram ride, and the other, transcendental, invisible one, mediated by a dream. The tram ride footage functions as the background of the text, but it also signifies human life unbroken and moving in time and space. Opposed to this are the circumstances from the dream, which I see as a glimpse into the otherworldliness, beyond the time and space.
Resume, 2007, performance, MM Centre, Zagreb
The performance is reinterpretation of my dream from 1991 of bringing coal out of a mine as the resume’ abstract of my dealings with dreams. The account of the dream is: I go down to the abandoned mine where a heap of coal and a wheel-barrow waits for me. I load coal into the wheel-barrow and bring it out into daylight. In performance I shift coal in a wheel-barrow from one to the other side of a stage. The same action is repeated in video projection. The soundtrack at the end of performance is True Faith by New Order.
Marjan’s Dream, 2005, performance, Insert (Retrospective of Croatian Video Art), Museum of Contemporary, Art, Zagreb
As the performance begins I take off my shirt and soak it in a blue pot. I put the shirt back and climb the ladder leaning against the wall. While sitting on the ladder I listen to the audio recording of the recollection of Marijan Crtalić’s dream, and then I climb down the ladder. Simultaneously, video recording of me climbing up and down the ladder is projected over the ladder and myself onto the wall. My goal was to create the inspiring environment for audience to pay attention and listen the reading of the dream. For this purpose I created a scheme with ladder, where the ladder suggests transcendental, mystical nature of a dream. Drenched shirt and ‘doubling’ the acts happening in the projection – procedures I also performed in performances Markita’s Dream and Željko’s Dream - signify the attempt to communicate between conscious-self with unconscious-self, which is necessary to resolve a dream.
Markita’s Dream, 2004, performance, Studio of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
I take off my shirt and drench it in a blue pot, then I put on a wet shirt and write Markita Franulić’s dream in water using a pintbrush on the wall. Previously recorded video of the same performance but with a dry shirt is simultaneously projected on the wall. The performance ends while I lean against the wall and listen to the audio recording of the dream, covered with my own projected image. Like in other performances based on ‘doubling’ the projection, basic intention is to emphasize and make visible the dualities conscious/unconscious, dream/reality. In this respect, projection in performance signifies the unconscious and the dreamer, and the actual presence of the performer signifies the conscious awakened ‘me’.
Željko’s Dream, 2004, performance, Karas Gallery, Zagreb
I put on a wet shirt and write the dream by Željko Begić in water and a paintbrush on the wall. Previously recorded video of this same action with dry shirt is simultaneously projected on the wall. At the very end the lights go out. Sitting on a chair next to the wall I listen the audio recording of the dream with audience, in the total darkness.
Bread, Brickwork, 2005, installation, Gallery Križić-Roban, Zagreb
The installation is made of loafs of bread that are installed on the floor in a form of a low wall. Bread and water signify elementary human needs and points toward necessary reduction to essentials in the raging culture of consumerism that hypnotizes us with abundant supply of goods. The form of the wall, the barriers of bread, suggests the possibility of endless building up and in that sense the installation is unfinished. The wall is to hypothetically assume gigantic proportions. In this hypothetical extention of the wall one can ‘hear’ its social component - the ‘voice’ of the poor.
Selected Dreams - More Real Than Reality, 2004, installation, Karas Gallery, Zagreb
Drying racks loaded with wet laundry - sheets, pillow cases and similar, are installed between two opposed mirrors at the ground floor of Karas Gallery. Two rows of chairs on which visitors can sit and listen to the audio recordings of 23 dreams selected and recounted by my friends and colleagues; are installed between two opposed mirrors on the gallery’s first floor.
Roberto’’s Message, 2003, performance, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb
Illuminated by the black light I write Roberto’s Message on the wall in water . After that I change the sheets on the bed. I write Robert’s Message on the wall again, but this time in fluorescent paint. I lie down on the bed and turn off the black light. In total darkness, together with the audience, I listen to the old Napolitan song Cuore n’gano (Unfaithful Heart) by Roberto Cuciola.
Dream Net, 2001, on-line project, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb www.g-mk.hr/on-line/dreams
The Dream Net is an interconnected labyrinthlike structure made of 30 dreams I have been dreaming and writing down from 1991 onwards. Photographs by Zoran Pavelić illustrate the accounts of the dreams. Navigating through the dreams is possible by keypressing the hypertext to access the other dream. The second method is to select a dream on the schematic map of the project displayed online in the shape of the molecular structure. The Dream Net is realized with web designer Ivan Kraljević.
Selected Dreams, 2001, ink jet prints on photo paper
The Selected Dreams is a collage of dream accounts with photo portraits of the dreamers. The series marked the beginning of the Selected Dreams project that became the framework within which I have been collecting dreams of my friends and acquaintances since 2001. Some of the dreams from this series became in coming years the basic content and structure for the diverse body of work executed in different medium. The series present dreams and photo portraits by: Marijan Crtalić, Boris Cvijetanović, Markita Franulić, Ivan Kožarić, Ivan Kraljević, Vlado Martek, Radmila Iva Janković, Ksenija Turčić, Vlasta Žanić, Daria Torre, Bojana Švertasek, Branko Franceschi, Silvije Čolić, Silva Kalčić, Jadranka Mlinar, Ružica Zajec, Miloš Pavković, Božena Končić – Badurina, Duje Jurić, Frane Rogić, Ante Jerković, Sonja Briski – Uzelac i Željko Tomić.
Selected Dreams, 2002, intervention in public space, Urban Fest, Zagreb
The accounts from the Selected Dreams were printed in white letters on black A4 papers and placed on the tram stops and shop windows across the city.
Visitation, 2002, interactive CD-rom
Visitation is realized in collaboration with Ivan Kraljević for the Temporary Accommodation exhibition at the Studio of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Visitation is composed of 14 panoramic photographs of apartments belonging to various Croatian artists. Browsing and zooming enable visitors to detect a hidden object, an intimate detail of the apartment. 15th image is dedicated to the poem about home, Winter Night, by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl.
Forsythia, 2002, video 13’
Forsythia was recorded in the yard of the house on NjegoĹĄeva Street 11, in Zagreb, where I lived for a short time. It presents my numerous attempts to break in (to run, to jump, to fly) into a big yellow bush of forsythia in fool bloom. Each of these entrances ended whit my temporary disappearance it the hearth of the bush, followed by repeated reappearance out of forsythia, and in the new attempts to break in.
Movement, 2002, performance, Sisak
I sit at the table and watch the video projection of my performance titled I am not conscious. The situation on the stage is almost identical to the one being projected . The shift happens in the moment when, simultaneously in the projection and in real time, I turn on the cassette player with the recording of Sarŕa, Sarŕa l’Aurora (Dawn Will Come) by Eros Ramazzotti. Because of a few seconds long lapse, the two recordings clash thus creating a cacophony.
I’am not conscious, 2000, performance, Gallery SC Gallery, Zagreb
I enter the cage carrying a blue pot. I turn on the cassette player in the corner and sit at the table. After the first notes of the song Sarŕa, Sarŕa l’Aurora (Dawn will come) by Eros Ramazzotti I put the blue pot over my head and continue listening to the song until its end.
The Dreams - 1991, 2001, ambiental installation, Art Gallery Slavonski Brod
In The Dreams – 1991 I have interpreted accounts of the dreams which I had noted during 1991. Accounts of dreams written with black felt pen on transparent nylon are laid on concrete floor. White columns along the atrium were partially painted black.
Back from the unconsciousness, 1999, performance, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb
With the help of my partner Zoran Pavelić I bring a blue pot full of water in the room. We both wear scuba diving suits. In the moment in which he leaves the room the soundtrack Don’t fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult starts. I throw water from the pot over everything in the room: drying rack with laundry, table, bed, pillow, mirror, clothes hanging on a peg, walls and floor. At the end, I throw the water over the floor towards the audience. What was left after the performance remained exhibited for few more days in the gallery.
Coal from the unconsciousness, 1999, installation, Gallery SC, Zagreb
The installation is composed of a metal cage with a heap of coal inside and overturned wheelbarrow on top of it. It is materialization of my dream about bringing coal out of a mine (see the account of the dream in the description of Resume’).
RESUME /essay from the catalogue Parallel life/
In 1991 Kata Mijatović dreamt about descending into a coal mine. In the dream, she decided to bring coal out, to the daylight. That year, and let’s not forget it is the year of the beginning of the war, Kata dreamt many more dreams which she carefully noted and which have become, in the years that followed, an inexhaustible source of her work as an artist. She named her performance in the Multimedia centre Resume thus marking it as part of the series of her dream-staging performances, but also as an event which would help to summarize and reflect upon her work. In the performance she returned to her first contact with the scene/object/sign/metaphor of the coal pyramid, which figured as a trigger for a personal and artistic process that has been in progress since and whose continuality and meaning is questioned through this act of repetition. This performance is simultaneously a revision of the author’s installation The coal from the unconscious, from 1999. In it, the pyramid is literally brought from a dream into the light, and locked in a cage in the front yard of the Studentski centar Gallery. It was her first dream-staging: and as if the primary - and private, instance of a dream staging wasn’t enough, like it demanded a new translation, a new transfer, the artist upgraded written words with an image, she “returned” them into the image, and by doing so she captured the dreamt object/sign/metaphor in a cage, depriving it of the possibility of a new transformation into the unarticulated and unconscious. In the her later works, the author didn’t deal with the materializations of actual dreams, but with the attempts to map relations and ways between the conscious and the unconscious. A recurrent motif is water, a minimal material agent which symbolically performs the transfer and allows the unconsciousness to captivate tangible reality. The 1999 installation What is it like in the unconscious? the artist exhibits water-wetted paintings made from cut pieces of clothing. In the performance Return from the unconscious, with the assistance of Zoran Pavelić, the artist, dressed in a diving suit, with a touch of humor and grotesque, wets the space with water from a blue pot, another attribute of communication with the unconscious which, like so many other elements of her performances and installations, transfers and moves to her other works. Only a year after, in the performance I amnot conscious, at the same location in the yard of the Studentski centar Gallery where she had earlier performed Coal from the unconscious, she again placed a cage in which she locked herself this time, covered her head with a blue pot, ritually listening to an Eros Ramazzoti song, Sarŕa, Sarŕa l’Aurora (Dawn will come). In the number of works that followed, Kata Mijatović questioned the possibility of translation and orchestration of memory to the dream content. In 2001, she used the floor of the open atrium of the Art gallery in Slavonski Brod and put down plastic foils with
her dreams written on it. The work was the starting point for The Dream Net, her first Internet project, produced by Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, in which she placed those same dreams in a virtual space and gave them a form of hipertext, a net where all dreams were intertwined and concept/sign from one dream become a guideline which opened a gate to another dream. With the performance Selected Dreams in Močvara, 2002, she started the long-term homonymous project in which she shifted attention from hers to other people’s dreams. This usually took form of the performance, in which she listened, together with the audience, previously recorded dreams or she wrote them down with water on the wall. In 2005, this change of interest resulted in the new Internet project The Dream Archive which invited all the users of the Internet to record and deposit their dreams in this virtual warehouse. By the artistic act of naming the work Resume and by using the elements from works she made in the last seven years, the author turns her own work into a content of the performance. It was performed in the Multimedia Centre in which - unlike in galleries or in open spaces - the performing space and the audience were separated, which added to the theatricality of the performance. The set is made out of the previously mentioned coal pyramid, a cart, a shovel, and a projection of an identical set and an identical event in the background which created an illusion of a multiple perspective distancing and scene multiplication. The artist entered the scene, and with completely uniform movements accompanied by sharp and dull noises shoveled coal into a cart. When she filled the cart, she drove it to the opposite, left edge of the stage and she poured coal onto the floor, returned and repeated the same action until the right side of the stage was emptied, while on the left side emerged a coal pyramid, identical to the one from the beginning of the performance. An identical procedure, on the same set, and with a slight time delay, took place on a projection screen in the background. The humdrum action and sound produced by it is interrupted before the end of the performance with music from the speakers: True Faith by New Order. Symmetrical doubling (left-right; reality-illusion) is easily perceived as a basic formal motif of the performance, creating the opposites that are so often seen in Kata Mijatović’ work. But instead of apparently solid structure and binary quality, it is possible to see this doubling only as a subset of a more general principle which seems to be crucial for Kata Mijatović’ entire work- repetition. In text-book conditions, “descending”, as Kata Mijatović often calls this process, to the unconsciousness, as if it was the place “where one can go to and come back with the material evidence for the unconsciousness” coincides with the Plato’s doctrine of remembering as a cognitive process. According to Plato, the soul had been once placed into the Eternity where it possessed all the knowledge about the truth, and the fragments of this knowledge could still be reached and conceived through a method of remembering. On the other hand, both Kierkegaard and Lacan question that possibility. Kierkegaard is under the influence of Christian dogma of the original sin according to which it is impossible to conceive the truth without the intervention from God. Lacan, in terms of his doctrine of the di-
vided subject denies the possibility of the return and establishes the repetition as a principle of self - actualization of the subject, claiming the impossibility of the true repetition and making it a part of a paradox that states that it is only possible to repeat the impossibility of the repetition. In that way, every repetition consists of a shift, a change, a creation of a new content. In The Shift, performed in Zadar in 2002, the effect of this change (shift) is indicated: with a projection of previous performance I am not conscious the artist sit at a desk and watched a projection of her own work together with the audience, insisting on listening a song by Ramazzotti anew. There, as in many other performances, the song is a mediator of a potential message from the unconscious and a catalyst of change. In this way in Resume a symbolically titled song True Faith touches a possible Sisyphus absurdity of the act of perpetual transmitting/translating substance from one side to another, one work to another, one dream to another, and also plays with a possible absurdity of pursuing art, or even absurdity of life itself. Even though the effect of music in Resume is not without ambiguity and though it flirts with both possibility of catharsis and survival of the possibility of the absurd, it nevertheless achieves its goal, whichever direction it leads. Resume reminds us that Kata Mijatović’s entire art could be understood as her Internet project “dream net”’ double- like in that virtual net, it s possible to float over Kata’s artistic world, drawing water lines that cross, separate and clash given places of individual works, thus fragmenting and unifying her entire art production at the same time. In one of her interviews, Kata Mijatović told that, in spite of spending a significant part of day dreaming, people tend to ignore dreams in everyday life. She joked that people should not, when they first meet, discuss where did they live and what did they do, but ask each other about their dreams. And you? What did you dream about last night? Ivana Bago IVANA BAGO - art historian, writer and curator. She is the co-founder (with Antonia Majaca) of DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables, dedicated to research and publishing in the field of contemporary art and theory. She is the author - in collaboration with Antonia Majaca, the Kontejner collective and individually - of a series of curatorial, publishing, and research projects and writings (Removed from the Crowd, 2009-; Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards, MUAC, Mexico City, 2012; Spaport Biennial / Where Everything is Yet to Happen, Banja Luka, Zagreb, 2009-2011; The Orange Dog and Other Tales, 2009-, Stalking With Stories, Apexart, New York, 2007), focusing on the history of art and exhibition practices of the 1960s and 1970s, performance art, feminism, labor, collectivities, self-organization, as well as the contemporary art and politics in the wake of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN/ABOUT THE UNCONSCIOUS: what does Kata Mijatović dream about? The awareness of the illusionary wholeness of the subject within itself and of the architectonics of the world is a chronic symptom of contemporaneity, paradoxically resisted by an attempt to form an identity by endlessly multiplying it. According to Renata Salecl, the roots of being traumatized by the authorities that are not up to their symbolic status are in collision with the mantra of the skillfully packaged demand for selfrealization, as well with the cynical recognition that this demand is impossible. This anxiety has been deepened by the upsets of AIDS, the unsolved legacy of colonialism and totalitarianism, the globalization confusion, the promises of ecstatic cancellation of suffering in cyberspace, or the hope of annulment of consciousness by mutating into one’s own clone. The crisis schizophrenically culminated in wars, either in a direct way, as is the case here, or indirectly, by aggressive waves of emigrants and refugees who threaten the Western “peace” to collapse. In Croatia, the war left physically maimed and mentally tortured individuals, both literally and metaphorically. As Julia Kristeva noted, commenting the Balkans situation in a conversation, they definitely feel that they cannot get the minimum that would allow them to continue living without being exposed to such mental and physical exhaustion as a consequence of social and economic uncertainty. Although in the work of Kata Mijatović we immediately notice the very initiation neurosis of the urgency to balance one’s internal and external beings, one’s conscious and subconscious, or more precisely, unconscious, it is not possible to read the questioning of the personal while neglecting the experience of such social reality. “I am made up of the matter of my dreams”, wrote Gaston Bachelard. Kata Mijatović says the same thing in her web-work Dream Net (www.miroslav-kraljevic.hr/dreams) (2001), in which she combines short descriptions of her dreams from 1991 with photographs which her partner Zoran Pavelić has been taking during the last ten years. Plowed fields, an umbrella in an empty room, a tidy bed; these scenes are not devoid of a sense of rejection, a residue of nostalgia, and of melancholy, but only when they slowly fade out from the screen into a blackness from which emerge words that describe a dream, the story really becomes a web of fragments of the artist’s subjectivity. The title itself, which contains the word “web”, followed by the web design by Ivan Kraljević - the work is initiated by a scheme resembling a molecular structure, circles numbered 1 to 30, which is the number of the dreams, and of the lines connecting them - suggests a navigation without a definite beginning or end. Moreover, after a while, tracking the work becomes more conditioned by the internal logic of the work than we could control and make our choices. We delve deeper and deeper into streams of subconsciousness, and we don’t know if it is the artist’s or ours. When Rosalind E. Kraus analyzes the role and the meaning of the notion of web in art, she lucidly notes how
its nonlinear structure, from the structuralist viewpoint resembles a mythical one, or, if we talk about psychoanalysis, it resembles the structure of the subconscious. As we have already said, Kata Mijatović appropriates both viewpoints, by choosing the title of the work, and choosing her visual material - for instance, when she invokes the legacy of romanticism using a version of a web, a window. The window - locus of the reconstitution of the being, according to Krauss - is closed in one of the dreams; a curtain is drawn over it. Contrary to this scene, in which the camera is characteristically aimed from the room to the window, in the second scene we see the artist standing in the open, and behind her, windows, both open and shut, filling half the cadre. In one of the dreams, a window offers a dim view of the kitchen, and this scene is labeled by a text containing a maternal reference, which is not insignificant. Personal mythology and the subconscious intertwine. I sit in the kitchen, in the old house; mymama is here, standing by the stove and watching through the window. It is dark outside; the sky is far away and full of stars. I approach the window and I see two stars falling, I loudly say that now one should make a wish (I am sure that my wish will be fulfilled), and at the same moment I notice a hole opening in the sky, black on the dark blue background of the sky. In fear, it comes to my mind that one of the stars did it, but the scene slowly changes and I understand that what I see is not night sky, but an improvised wooden façade, a screen with a hole in the middle. When she speaks about the states of crisis and fragmentation - both of the artist and of the esthetic object - Julia Kristeva asserts that, to talk about artistic work as an expression of these states, we must invoke the experience of psychoanalysis. Freud’s conception of the unconscious as our hell, Kristeva concludes, is crucial to the notion that the crisis cannot be separated from the human being. Kata Mijatović locates her project on the vague border between the conscious and the unconscious; as with an inverted glove, she plays with possibility to equate the illogicalities of dreams with the experienced everyday life. And the everyday, narrated thorough a dream, is gloomy and uncertain, and contrary to dreams, it does not imply the relief of waking up. It seems that the journey thorough the labyrinths of dreams is a frantic browsing the tangled areas of consciousness, as well as a comment of the nightmarish reality. This is precisely why Dream Net is not completely hermetic; a collective memory is woven into it, in which everyone is invited to recognize one’s own levels of consciousness, conditioned psychologically and socially. Kata Mijatović realized this purpose most transparently in her project Selected Dreams (2002), which she presented in three separated units. In Močvara club in Zagreb, she presented a performance in which she was sitting on a ladder, inside a cage, and together with the audience she was watching the projection of the texts and photographs from Selected Dreams. But, while she based the Dream Net exclusively on her own
dreams, now it is about recorded dreams and private photo-portraits of Ivan Kožarić, Marijan Crtalić, Ksenija Turčić, Vlasta Žanić… I dreamt about meeting a painter, a friend of mine who had died not long before (Fruk). I met him on the beach from Fellini’s dolce vita. Surprised to see him, I greeted him cordially and asked him how it was over there. He answered it was fine. Somehow unhappy with the answer, I continued to ask: “Well, what do you do, do you paint?” He said he did paint and that everything was somehow similar to “down there”. The only difference was that there were no systems of values. I explained this to myself, then and many times after that - so, there is no good and bad, up and down, beautiful and ugly, black and white, nor blue and red… etc./Vlasta Žanić/ The experience was deepened by Gershwin’s Summer Time, song by Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin. The second presentation of Selected Dreams, in Hannover, is a shift from the Self to the Other. Lit by a spotlight, the artist was reading the dreams of her friends, and the translator was sitting in the dark part of the stage, translating the text into German. Again, Bachelard comes to mind - “Vision tells too many things at once. The being does not see itself. Maybe listens to itself.” Therefore, the dreams were spoken, and the music, which is for Kata Mijatović what is madeleine for Proust, was replaced by voices, thus multiplying their meaning and reception - through experiencing the two colors, the rhythm of the voices, intertwining the two languages that not everyone in the audience understood, and, of course, thorough the presence of the author and the translator, acting either as catalysts or as hindrances for the reception. At the Urban festival in Zagreb last summer, Kata Mijatović was putting the prints of Selected Dreams on tram stations and bookstore windows. On this occasion, she says, passers-by were taking the texts that had just been exhibited and leaving with them. This poses some new questions, which will, at the least, directly provoke suppositions that, when Kata Mijatović speaks about herself, she speaks about the Other, that is, that she never stops to contemplate the outside where she/Other resides. In this way, the perception of private and public work is being distorted; it is being reactivated also as a critical manifesto of reality, but always from a distance and only provisionally. For example, speaking about presenting Selected Dreams on the street, one could speculate about whether the public really became sensible for art, or is it only consumer ideology of accepting everything that is offered, and finally, is the artist herself interested in these interpretations at all. Is she intrigued by how many people have read, let alone decided to keep a paper offering them a dream, and not an invitation to a demonstration or to join a yoga class? Kata Mijatović is interested in communication; she insists that one should consciously cooperate with the unconscious, because it never lies. The Dream Net originated in cooperation with Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, based on K+Z installation (2001), presented in Galerija umjetnina in Slavonski Brod, where Zoran Pavelić had his exhibition simultaneously. The artist’s texts, handwritten
on a transparency, were laid out on the floor and on the walls, while the upper parts of columns in the backyard were painted white, and the lower, black, thus alluding to the binarity of yin and yang, earth and sky, night and day, dream and wake. A happy coincidence - the best that happened, Kata Mijatović revealed in a conversation with Željko Jerman, was that rain began to sprinkle “my dreams” - was a sign that dreaming could actually be a state of awareness, contrary to the desensitized state of wake. In accordance to the practice in the 90s, which largely leans on the feministart of Susan Hiller, Annette Messager or Martha Rosler, but Kata Mijatović, disillusioned and rejecting any political angle, is primarily oriented towards self-examination. Aware that the attempt was impossible, she searches for the primal fragments of the self, aiming to articulate at least a part of the truth about being in crisis. As we have already pointed out, works by Kata Mijatović are not deaf to the social context in which they originate. In Temporary Accommodation (2002), a project that she realized with Zoran Pavelić for the Museum of Contemporary Art, she touched the theme of war, perhaps in the most direct way, as well as refugees, and everyday life in which artists are marginalized and deprived of possibilities to make a living by doing their work. However, the tenant status that she and her partner are bound to endure, or the experience of refugee status of their families, are themes that the artist presents from her peculiar poetic angle. In Forsythia video, realized in this occasion, she finds inspiration in the blue flower in the back garden of a rented apartment. We see her trying to enter, she starts toward it twenty-odd times, and every time she disappears in a dash of it. Did the attempt to enter/move into the apartment succeed, or her constant efforts and vanishings suggest that such a wish is only an illusion? At the same time, the web work Visit (www. katamijatovic. mi2.hr), offers to enter her and Pavelić’s home, and the homes of thirteen of their friends - Marija and Zlatko Kopljar, Tomislav Gotovac, Markita Franulić and Boris Cvjetanović, Branka Stipančić and Mladen Stilinović, Marijan Molnar, etc. Among them is Georg Trakl, whose poetic greatness, which ended in a schizophrenic cocaine- induced dream at the onset of World War I, is a permanent inspiration for Kata Mijatović. In the texts within the Dream Net, certain words are emphasized by color-coding - coal, narrow passage, feather, light, snow, dust, night - or, otherwise - I am lying, I am sitting, I am seeing. The artist systematizes, she makes a list of her personal vocabulary that she started in a series of earlier projects; among them was The Life of Trakl installation (1997). Presented in Zagreb Nova gallery, it was based on three elements forming a triangle - a black cardboard box on one wall, a white shirt on the other, and on the floor, a circle of salt with a glass of water in the center. The materials used, as the artist herself says, are actually embodied words. As she describes, the black ink she used to color the box means silence to her, a cessation of empty talk about war and politics. The salt and the glass of water symbolize desire, a thirst for silence that she
equals with poetry. Kata Mijatović argues that the conscious can approach the unconscious only in the language of poetry. When the night fell, Father became an old man; in the gloomy house, Mother’s face hardened, and the boy felt the damnation of a depraved family. Sometimes he would reminisce about his childhood, in which there were many illnesses, horrors and darkness, secret games in the starry garden, and feeding rats in the gloomy backyard. The slim figure of his sister would get out of the blue mirror and he would collapse into the darkness, as if he were dead. His mouth would pop like a red fruit, and the stars would shine over his silent sorrow. His dreams filled the ancient house of the ancestors. At dusk, he would wander on a neglected graveyard, or watch the corpses in a gloomy mortuary, green patches of decay on their beautiful hands. At the gates of a convent, he asked for a piece of bread; a shadow of a sparrow appeared from the darkness and startled him. When he was lying in his cold bed, he wept unutterable tears. But there were nobody to put a hand on his forehead. Trakl did not endure the damnation of the exiled form Eden, said Kata Mijatović, explaining her exhibition entitled Preparations (1998) for Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. With its six installations, it was a continuation of The Life of Trakl and of earlier Desire (1996), presented in Dubrovnik Otok gallery. In this installation - it consisted of a large square, painted in black ink on a newspaper, and of a circle made of salt – the artist, annoyed with politics, had already stepped on the territory of silence, the only acceptable space of distance from direct, ineffective participation. In Preparations, assembling the installations from the whiteness of feathers, canvas, salt, glass, and water, the artist suddenly puts the warmth of wood within the loud whisper of the embodied words, as a powerful counterpoint. In this way, the sober discretion of the materials is broken by a strong emotional incursion, a remembrance of childhood, when “Grandpa was beautifully arranging chopped wood”. In her projects before Dream Net and Written Dreams, Kata Mijatović also materializes her personal vocabulary, made from dreams/remembrances. Her installation Coal from the subconscious (1999), inspired by a dream from 1989, which consisted of a cage and a heap of coal inside it, with a handcart in upside-down position on top of it, she presented in the open, near the Zagreb Student Center. The cage, which was to be used again in performances I am not Conscious (2000) and Shift (2002), signifies reality, or as the artist says, the consciousness. “I wanted it to look as I really descended to the mineshaft of the subconscious, dug out three tons of coal and put it in a cage - the conscious”, she writes. In this installation, and in the performances, Kata Mijatović also deals with oppositions of warm-cold and consciousness- subconsciousness. She impregnates the rationality of consciousness with love, a yearning for home, which we recognize in her materials: flowers, wood, coal, fire. Freud is on the scene. Das das Kind an seinem Bette steht, ihn an Arme fast, und ihm vorwurfsvoll zuraunt: Vater, siehst du denn nicht, dass ich verbrenne?
As a sequel to Coal from the subconscious, in ambient installation Back from the Unconscious (1999) in Zagreb Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, the artist added new wordsmaterializations to the longing to dive into the unconscious: she put scissors into a blue pot and filled it with water, and she presented the fabric of her cut-out clothes, also infused with water, as a series of canvases. As in the most of her other projects, the sense of hearing plays a part, too - the viewer hears water splashing. To further examine the theme she treated in Coal from the subconscious, to open the door of the unconscious, Kata Mijatović returns to SC and performs I am not conscious - in a closed cage, she sits at a table covered with a white tablecloth, with the blue pot, which she had used before, on her head. Her persevering urge to understand, to hear and to feel is almost painful; in her performance Shift, presented in Zadar, he silently stands beside the very same table and watches its video projection. Sara l’Aurora, a song by Eros Ramazzotti, provides the sense of sweet and sour nostalgia - Morning will come / there is a hope / everything will change / you only have to believe/. How it is in the Unconscious? (1999), a performance she presented with Zoran Pavelić in Zagreb Gradska Gallery is not based on a dream, but is inspired by remembrances from childhood. But, do we manage to tell the one from the other? In the backyard of my grandmother’s house in Branjina, near the entrance gate, beside the rusty wire fence, grass and weed on the other side, there was an old, narrow well, covered with moss. It had no covering, and one would get water from it using a tin bucket, hanging at the end of a long rope. The bucket rested on a brick surface, and the free end of the rope hung over the wire fence. You would drop the bucket in the well using the rope. First you would hear a thump on the surface of the water, then a splash, and then you would slowly rotate the bucket until it was full. The hands would feel the weight and start pulling the rope, and the bucket would bump into the slippery, green walls of the well and spill over some water, making the moss wet. On the edge of the opening, from the inner side, a wild rose bush was growing between the bricks, and its flowers were always wet. When the bucket or a human hand touched the flowers, you could see the white flowers and green serrated leaves moving in the dark water mirror. In summertime we often happened to draw buckets full of water with wild rose petals floating on its surface. The awareness that we have lost the protection of childhood forever, reinforced by losing one’s home, amounts to cutting the umbilical cord connecting us with ourselves; a realization, as Boltanski says, that we all have a dead child lying inside us. When Kata Mijatović for her performance installs a table with slices of bread, a glass and a plate, as well a bed, a mirror, and monochromatic canvases, she once again asks “who am I?”, measuring the permeability of borders between remembrances and dreams. Their overlapping mutates into a hallucinatory performance, a theatre of the absurd that, in real time and space, inarticulately mumbles not about remembering, but about experiencing the experience of remembering. Dressed in diving suits, Kata Mijatović
and Zoran Pavelić spill water from big blue pots on everything that is presented, trying to reestablish the broken circuit between the inside and the outside, between parts of consciousness and subconsciousness that might confirm the subject. As well as in her other works, the artist postpones the reconciliation of identity split. She is aware of the failure. Appearing in a diving suit, and inviting her partner to do the same, she in a comical way performs a ritual game without a solution, to the very exhaustion. Moreover, in the same way as in her other works - for instance, when she puts a pot on her head, or sits anonymously among the viewers, looking at her own work, or when she, under a spotlight, reads other people’s dreams, presuming that the Hannover audience did not understand it - now she leads an intimate conversation with her own personal past and the trauma of separation from innocence that she hopes to find in the unconscious. Using the tactics of constant avoidance, Kata Mijatović nonviolently leads the viewer to do the same action. By letting go, we learn more about ourselves than the artist had ever told us about herself. Ružica Šimunović
RUŽICA ŠIMUNOVIĆ - Art historian and ethnologist (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Zagreb); since 2002 creative producer of the Movement of the Point broadcast on HR 1 and since 2012 host at the Guest Editor broadcast on HR 2 of The Croatian Radio. Author of the monograph Zoran Pavelić: Political Speech is Suprematism (published by PLEH, 2013). Winner of the AICA Croatia Award for art critique (2011).
CURRICULUM VITAE Kata Mijatović is multimedia artist and her primary media are performance and video. She was born in 1956 in Branjina, Croatia. In 1981 she graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek, Croatia. From 1988-1991 she is member of the art group Swamp, in Baranja. From 19911993 she studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. From 1993-1996 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, from where she graduated in 1997, in the class of prof. Đuro Seder. Since 1999 she is member of the Croatian Association of Independent Artists (ZUH). From 2005-2009 she was member of the Artistic Board of Baranja Art Colony (BUK). Since 2005 she runs AŽ Gallery, at Žitnjak Ateliers, Zagreb (www.a-z.hr). Since 2007 she is member of the art group PLEH. She lives and works in Zagreb. Address: Žitnjak 53, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia E-mail: kmijatovic0@gmail.com SELECTED INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS 2013 Between the Sky and the Earth, Sala Tiziano, Croatia Pavilion, 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2012 Dream from the Underpass, Događanja Gallery, Zagreb 2011 Call to Action, with Zoran Pavelić, MSU DAN 2, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb The Look of Resistance, with Vlasta Žanić, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Greetings from Baranja, with Zoran Pavelić, Kooh-i-nor Gallery, Copenhagen 2010 The Calling, Glyptotheque of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts/HAZU, Zagreb Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 2009 Choir, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Two Dreams, performance, Days of Open Performance / Dopust, Split Screaming, Ring Gallery, Croatian Association of Visual Artists/HDLU, Zagreb 2008 Luka and Matej from Branjin Vrh, Prozori Gallery, Zagreb Visible / Invisible, Mali Salon, Rijeka 2007 Echo with Zoran Pavelić, Gallery Moria, Stari Grad, Island Hvar Kunst ist ein deutsches Wort/Art is a German Word, with Zoran Pavelić, Landeshauptstadt, Düsseldorf Visible / Invisible, Barrel Gallery, Croatian Association of Visual Artists/HDLU, Zagreb 2006 Visitation, MMC Kuglana, Koprivnica Resume, performance, MMC, Zagreb 2005 Dream Archive, online project, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb 2004 Building, Križić-Roban Gallery, Zagreb Markita’s Dream, performance, Studio of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Željko’s Dream, performance, Karas Gallery, Zagreb Selected dreams - more real than reality, Karas Gallery, Zagreb 2003 Selected Dreams, Ghetto Gallery, Split Robert’s Message, performance, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb Forsythia, Matica Hrvatska Gallery, Križevci 2002 Temporary Accommodation, with Zoran Pavelić, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Selected Dreams, performance, Club Močvara, Zagreb 2001 Dream net, online project, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb
1999
1998 1997 1996
Dreams - 1991, ( K+Z,), with Zoran Pavelić, Art Gallery, Slavonski Brod I am not Conscious, performance, SC Gallery, Zagreb Back from the Unconscious, performance, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb Coal from the Unconscious, SC Gallery, Zagreb How is it in the Unconscious?, Gradska Gallery, Zagreb Preparations, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Works on the Surface, PM Gallery, Croatian Association of Visual Artists/HDLU, Zagreb, The Life of Traklo, Nova Gallery, Zagreb The Craving, Island Gallery, Art Workshop Lazareti, Dubrovnik
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS 2013 All of me, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York ArtNight, Officina delle Zattere, Venecija 2012 Performance Art Festival, Osijek 2011 Plexus, Galženica Gallery, Velika Gorica Days of Open Performance/Dopust, Jedinstvo, Zagreb Image of Sound, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 2010 Nobody’s Safe, 50. Poreč Annual, Gallery Zuccato, Poreč Extended/ Ex-pe-ze, Kulturamt, Düsseldorf Picture of the sound, MKC, Split PLEH in Sarajevo, Charlama Depot Gallery, Sarajevo T-HT award@msu.hr, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 2009 Performance Arts Festival, Barutana, Osijek Days of Open Performance/Dopust, Split PLEH in Subotica, dr Vinko Perčić Gallery, Subotica, Serbia Temple, Ring Gallery, Croatian Association of Visual Artists/HDLU, Zagreb 2007 Baranja Art Colony 2005/6, Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb Art as Life, XX Slavonia Biennial, Kazamat Gallery, Osijek 2006 Do you celebrate Christmas?, Prozori Gallery, Zagreb 2005 Action-Attraction, 40 Years of SC Gallery, Zagreb Insert, Retrospective of Croatian Video Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 2004 Homeless Ideas, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb IV Days of Performance, Varaždin 2003 Urban Festival, Zagreb Die kleine Spionin, Barrel Gallery, Croatian Association of Visual Artists/HDLU, Zagreb, Zagreb Stories, video, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb Quarantine, Art Workshops Lazareti, Dubrovnik 2002 Osijek Art Summer, Kazamat Gallery, Osijek Zinnober 5, Studio 6ix PACK, Hannover Inter muros, Zadar Live II, International Art Project, Zadar 2001 Theatre and Myth, Gavella Theatre, Zagreb Transit, City Gallery, Lehrte, Germany 2000 Ambiance ‘90, Collegium Artisticum, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Ambiance’ 90, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka 1998 Books and Society 22%, public space, Zagreb
1997 1996 1995 1994 1990
Small Planet Earth, European Council, Strasbourg, France XVI Slavonia Biennial, Visual Arts Gallery, Osijek Kunst in der Stadt, Frankfurter hof, Mainz, Germany International Triennial of Painting, Sofia, Bulgaria International Art Workshop, Lamparna, Labin Art Express, Labin Slavonian Artist, Pecs Gallery, Pecs, Hungary Group Swamp, Gallery CM, STUC, Osijek
WORKS IN COLLECTIONS: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia Filip Trade Collection – Lauba House, Zagreb, Croatia