Slavonian Biennial is a juried group exhibition at which contemporary visual art is presented, chosen by the Jury composed of the following members: Janka Vukmir, president, Ana Knifer, Matej Knežević, Dalibor Prančević and Valentina Radoš, exhibition curator.
Through the title of the exhibition, we want to inquire into and present art as a life-long commitment and destiny, approached without compromise, and very often without the understanding of one’s environment. Within the title, we also connect two occurrences that significantly influenced the conceptual direction of the 29th version of the Slavonian biennial: in 2024 we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of artist Julije Knifer in Osijek, and the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the Gallery (now the Museum) of Fine Arts. Both of these anniversaries form the backbone of the exhibition concept: the life and work of Julije Knifer as an unquestionable example of an uncompromising and far-sighted artistic persistence, while the emphasis on the museum jubilee is an opportunity to comment on the role of different heritage and exhibition institutions and their perpetuating effect on the (mis)understanding of (contemporary) art. As curators, we ask ourselves the question of how to set up an exhibition within the theme of the invisible (and most often misunderstood) artistic will, in a museum as a bastion of fine culture, which in its jubilee year becomes invisible itself, i.e. closed for reconstruction of the physical exhibition space? In the exhibition Institute of the Invisible – Spaces of Perception, we also ask the artists a question about the true nature of their work – how to make visible what is invisible, intangible, untouchable… Through the answers offered by the artists, we want to confirm the vital idea of artistic autonomy with often invisible contours but with an eternal duration, and about art as a social and personal need entrusted to us to preserve, evaluate and interpret.
Valentina Radoš
It is in the nature of a work of art to suggest a different image of reality. A work of art can turn visible reality into an immaterial, imaginative image, or it can, as Julije Knifer writes in his Diaries, take the opposite route: The work I do is absurd in every way. And for that very reason, I have to turn that absurdity into a certain reality. [1.1.1985, 21:20] Therefore, he materializes the absurd through the realization of his works. And where do we look for invisibility? We look for it in work, in perception, in the process, in that space which is liminal, borderline, which is the interstitium between reality and (non)object, in the space of transformation, in the space of initiation, in the space of freedom. In the gap, where there may be the least space, but the most meaning.
It is similarly so with the medium of the exhibition and the symbolic meaning of the museum institution. The fact that somebody has gotten the possibility of an exhibition is more important than what will be shown, writes Goran Trbuljak in 1973, pointing to the process of affirmation of a work of art without its visibility or appearance making a difference, making this statement the actual work.
In both cases, invisibility is really a focus on the subtlety of insight, on perception, on thinking and acting. The subtlety of poetics is almost the only thing that can oppose the brutality of reality. In Slavonia, which is literally fading in its physical appearance, and Osijek, which has begun to develop increasingly, it is precisely in what is not yet clearly seen as an imbalance in everyday life that we should look for a mutual solidarity of politics and poetics; and artists are often the best researchers in this field.
Janka Vukmir