Opening: Thursday 10/11/2016, 20:00 hrs
Curator: Jasminka Babić
Solo exhibition by Neli Ružić entitled Shadows of the Future shows seventeen artworks created in the course of the last decade. After the last-years’ exhibitions entitled Time Lapsus shown at Salon Galić in Split and Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb that were her first solo exhibitions in Croatia after 1999, this is the first extensive exhibition project by this artist from Split.
Shadows of the Future unites various works like video, installation and objects that research the author’s relation to her personal past, as well as to the collective memory that consciously or un/consciously creates our present and future identity. Since she spent more than a decade living and working in Mexico, the experience of migration, research of various layers of memory and overlapping of personal and collective identities are a logical choice for the thematic framework for her work.
Exhibited works from the Strategies of Oblivion series from 2005/6 bridge geographical and time distances. Exhibitional narrative was also determined by the fact that number of these works remained unknown to Croatian public, so the artist retraced her own processes and methods and recreated works that had remained in Mexico. In her own words: “Geographical, historical and personal discontinuities are reflected in several ways: from absence to repetitions, from traces and re-writings (palimpsest) to transformations.”
More recent works are also shown at the exhibition – namely Stolen Future, 2015, for which Neli Ružić was awarded the second prize of the 9th T-HTAward@msu.hr at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Video was created as a part of the Motel Trogir project, when the artist performed a light intervention in the bungalows of Vitić’s motel, reacting to the constant deliberate entropy of modernist architecture in Croatia.
Intervention in public space of Bosanska Street in Split stands out as a special segment of the exhibition. Ružić will create spatial intervention as a re-interpretation of the anthological painting by Ljubo Babić entitled The Black Flags created in 1918.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (curator Sabina Salamon) where it will be shown in December.
The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art closes on 4th December 2016.