curated by_vienna 2011: EAST by SOUTH WEST --

In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes
curated by_Ana Janevski

Vlatka Horvat
Vlado Martek
Galerija Nova
Vladimir Petek
Slaven Tolj
Goran Trbuljak

Galerija Nova was founded in 1975 in Zagreb, as a part of the Center for Cultural Activity of the Socialist Youth of the City of Zagreb. Even though it was an official, state-run cultural institution, it had a radical exhibition program in the 1970s, showing avant-garde artists (including Aleksandar Srnec and Exat 51) together with emerging artists on the scene of the time (such as Mladen Stilinović, Goran Trbuljak, Group of Six Artists, et al.).

Since 2003 Galerija Nova has been run by the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom [WHW] as a nonprofit and still cityowned gallery. Thirty years later, the WHW program is keeping alive both local contemporary and historical artistic practices, as Galerija Nova has become a public space for social visibility and circulation of discourses that have been continuously ignored by mainstream/dominant cultural producers.

In the Future Everyone Will Be Anonymous for Fifteen Minutes is not a historical exhibition about Galerija Nova. Its aim is not to offer insight into the integral exhibition program of thirty-six years of activity. Although its starting point is a reflection upon the institutional (socialist) framework that has allowed the production and presentation of radical artistic activities, it has been our aim to point to the current self-sustainability of the local artistic scene that is still confronted with an absence of discourse about national art history as well as a lack of a market and of any official institutional valorization. In this way, Galerija Nova is treated as one of the exhibitors. The archival material and documentation from crucial moments of its activities—from the 1970s and the 2000s—are presented together with the artists who have worked with the gallery: from the experimental filmmaker Vladimir Petek (in the 1970s) to Goran Trbuljak and Vlado Martek (both in the 1970s and today) to Vlatka Horvat and Slaven Tolj (who have made their mark upon Galerija Nova and the Croatian art scene in the last decade).

In the 1970s Goran Trbuljak was interested in the figure of the “anonymous artist” working outside the gallery context. His new prediction, which lends the exhibition its title, points to the new globalized concern, opposite that of the 1970s. Nevertheless, the institutional mechanism of valorization and recognition still remains at stake.

Text: Ana Janevski