Andreja Kulunčić
She is a visual artist, lives in Zagreb. Her art practice is based on exploration of new models of sociability and communication situations, an interest for socially engaged themes, engagement with different audiences, and collaboration on collective projects. She sets up her own interdisciplinary networks, seeing artistic work as a research, process of cooperation and self-organization. She often asks the audience to actively participate in the work. Some of Kulunčić’s frequent subjects are correlations between economy, transition, feminism and racism. By operating in the marginal areas of opposition and focusing her critique on the central values of imaginary institutions of globalizing societies and divisions conditioned by them, her artistic production expands the capability of art to offer polemical grounds for the rethinking and dissolution of certain relations and the creation of new ones.
Her work has been presented at major international exhibitions, such as Documenta11 (Kassel); Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt/Main); 8. Istanbul Biennial; Liverpool Biennial 04; 10. Triennale-India (New Delhi). At collective shows in museums, including Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); PS1 (New York); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo – MUAC (Mexico City); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Etienne, etc. At solo shows, including Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo – MUAC (Mexico City); Jorge B. Vargas Museum (Manila); Modern Gallery (Podgorica); Museo Madre (Napoli); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.
Website: www.andreja.info
Artist: Andreja Kulunčić
Curators: Irena Bekic, Anca Mihuleț
17.12.2024-31.01.2025
ARAC, Anca Poterașu Gallery
26 Popa Soare Street, Bucharest
The exhibition ”You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It” is a part of the project ”In(Visible) Traces. Artistic Memories of the Cold War”, initiated by Documenta in Zagreb and organized together with the Romanian Association for Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Blockfrei, Vienna and The Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial, Dresdenand, and funded by EU. The project aims to engage artists, researchers, educators, policymakers, and citizens in reflecting, preserving and discussing European cultural heritage, focusing on neglected Cold War-era historical sites.
Through artistic spatial interventions at the sites of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, exhibitions, a website, publications, and a series of workshops, reading groups and talks, the project deconstructs the deliberate amnesia concerning the history of women on Goli Otok to open a way through to memory. In doing so, it reaches for a subversive commemorative form – an anti-monument – which does not impose memory but seeks it in the constantly renewed permeation of disputed memories and the knowledge and feelings of the audience.
The exhibition is conceived as a place of different flows. It becomes an island, an island ambience, a place of remembrance, an island simulacrum, a conduit for existence, a link between a past event and memory: a space for reflection and complementary thinking containing visual materials – drawings, photographs and objects – some of the outcomes of the artistic research; a site for the gestural interpretation of the daily tortures endured by the women on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur in the form of a video installation; and a zone for participation, which includes making female figurines from clay.
The figurines are made by the visitors of the exhibition, during a series of organized workshops or simply as a natural expression of their feelings after visiting the exhibition. It aims to deliver ways of activating memory, while participatory threads are constantly reconfiguring the mechanisms of understanding a marginal historical phenomenon.
The exhibition of Andreja Kulunčić “You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It” is a part of the project (In)Visible Traces. Artistic Memories of the Cold War, initiated by Documenta in Zagreb and organized together with the Romanian Association for Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Blockfrei, Vienna and The Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial, Dresden.
The project is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
More information on the website: Invisible traces artistic memories of the Cold War
Partners: Documenta Zagreb, Blockfrei Vienna, The Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial
Local partners: LG Romania
Graphic design credit: Andrei Reg