EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES
Critical Instrumentation, Exhibitive and Curatorial Narratives
10–12 March 2022
ONLINE on Google Meet, in English and Croatian meet.google.com/cay-kjwc-zsp
Niko Mihaljević. Vladimir Jakolić, photo from the Exhibition of Women and Men, June 26, 1969, Student Centre Gallery, Zagreb. Fine Arts Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb, Inv. No.: SC-46/F1
CO-ORGANIZERS
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split and Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA Croatia)
KEYNOTE LECTURERS
Ana Dević (WHW/What, How & for Whom), Professor James Elkins, PhD (Art Institute of Chicago), Professor Lev Manovich, PhD (The Graduate Center, City University of New York/Cultural Analytics Lab), Damir Gamulin and Antun Sevšek, Ivana Bago, PhD, Associate Professor Miriam De Rosa, PhD (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice) and Associate Professor Beti Žerovc, PhD (Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana)
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Professor Marina Gržinić, PhD, from the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana; Associate Professor Asja Mandić, PhD, from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Sarajevo; Assistant Professor Neli Ružić from the Arts Academy of the University of Split; alongside Assistant Professor Silva Kalčić, PhD, from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Split, President of AICA Croatia
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE ASSISTANTS
Miona Muštra and Anđelko Mihanović, PhD, former attendees of the art criticism workshop “Writing on Contemporary Art” in Zagreb and Split.
The aim of this conference is to present, examine and contextualise curatorial practices in contemporary art more comprehensively the for the first time in Croatian art history. It is important to note that the history of curatorial practices is a relatively little studied area in Croatian art history, while it is increasingly present at the international level. Our objective with this conference is to address this important subject at the crossroads of art criticism, theory and practice. There has been an increasing interest in exhibition history and contextualisation of curatorial practices in art-historical research. While we can trace back exhibition history in the modern sense of a universal right to publicness to the revolutionary turmoils of the late 18th century, it was the avant-garde tendencies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that gave the history of exhibition practices a new dimension, paving the way for innovative methods, participation and the questioning of existing institutional policies, contextual frameworks and models of presentation. The emergence of neo-avantgarde and the institutional critique of the 1950s and 1960s destabilised the conventional meanings and institutional positions of artists, artworks, curators and audiences, which led to a more active role of curators in mediating new artistic expressions, but also to a radical questioning of their own position. Curators became increasingly active in the creation of meaning, assuming more and more often, with their gestures or texts, the role of meta-artists, especially in the domain of conceptual art. Redefining the position of the curator-author has increasingly come into focus since the emergence of conceptual/neo-avantgarde tendencies in art.