kata portfolio engleski_Layout 1

Kata Mijatović / Portofolio
2011 - 1997
Božena’s Dream / Wipers, 2011, video, 11’ 30’’, Galženica Gallery, Zagreb
Božena’s Dream / Wipers video is inspired by the text of the dream published in Selected
Dreams - a collection of recorded dreams written by my friends and acquaintances, which I
have been accumulating from 2001 onwards. The process of recalling of dreams in the video
was used both as the content and the structural framework, similarly as in the series of works
that primarily dealt with the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious or the
translation of the subconscious into the conscious. Božena’s Dream / Wipers is based on the
recollection of the dream by the Croatian artist Božena Končić Badurina focused on the experience of dying and thoughts of death. The video is recorded in a static frame from the inside
of a car, focusing on the wipers removing the watercascading down the windshield. The text
of Božena’s dream appears repeatedly only to disappear completely by the end of the video.
Video footage functions as a membrane on which the text of the dream is written and therefore
it becomes essential to the meaning of the work.
Vlasta’s Dream / Crowd, 2011, video, 20’ 09’’, Galženica Gallery
Vlasta’s Dream / Crowd video is inspired by the text of the dream published in Selected
Dreams - a collection of dream records written by my friends and acquaintances, which I have
been accumulating from 2001 onwards. Video is based on the text of the dream by Croatian
artist Vlasta Žanić. Similar to the video Božena’s Dream / Wipers, experience of dying and
thoughts on death are the focal point of the dream. The background for Vlasta’s Dream /
Crowd is an everyday scene on Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, taken from bird’s eye view and
presenting bustle of people, arrivals and departures of trams. Text of Vlasta’s dream appears
repeatedly only to disappear completely by the end of the video. Video footage functions as a
membrane on which the text of dream is written becoming therefore essential to the meaning
of the work. The membrane looks as if permeable, so that the recorded reality absorbs the atmosphere of a dream, the same way the dream, thanks to the video footage in the background,
loses its personal, (private)reasons and takes on the characteristics of an enigmatic universal
message.
Dreams from the Underpass, 2011, video, 22’, Galženica Gallery
Video is filmed in one of the pedestrian underpasses in Zagreb. The static camera captures
people coming and going through the underpass. Eleven recollections of dreams by artist’s
friends are written over the video-recording, appearing and disappearing consecutively by the
end of the video. Video footage functions as a membrane on which the text of dream is written
and therefore it is essential to the meaning of the work. The membrane looks as if permeable,
so that the recorded reality absorbs the atmosphere of a dream, the same way the dream,
thanks to the video footage in the background, lose its personal and private reasons and take
on the characteristics of the enigmatic universal message.
Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, performance, 2010, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth is basically a performative intervention on The Shape
of the Space XIII, a 1965 sculpture by the renowned Croatian artist Ivan Kožarić. Sculpture is
produced in 2005 and installed on the west terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Zagreb. I slept in it from midnight of the August 20 until the next morning. The performance
is inspired by Ivan Kožarić’s statement, according which the sculpture represents the relationship between the sky and the earth. Starting from this interpretation and the claim that our
existence evolves between these two basic physical and metaphysical elements - sleeping in
Kožarić’s sculpture exceeds the physical dimension of the performance and makes the privileged stay in immaterial, universal space of his art for its principal goal. The choice of sleeping
as a form of staying in The Shape of the Space was inspired by my works with dreams in which,
to put it simply, the life functions like a dream between the sky and the earth, while the sleeping within this context represents the ‘shape’ of our stay on earth.
The Drive, 2011, three channel video, 27’, The Look of Resistance Exhibition, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Zagreb
The video presents panoramic view recorded in a static frame through the window during bus
drive from Zagreb to Osijek. Camera records a winter landscape of the Slavonia’s flatlands ,
nearby the city of Slavonski Brod. During the drive the words taken from the 2002 online work
The Dream Net (www.g-mk.hr/online/dreams) appear and disappear on the window glass.
The Dream Net is an interconnected labyrinthlike structure made of 30 dreams I dreamt and
wrote down from 1991 onwards. Hypertext marking the key words enable navigation by keypress through the net, linking one dream to the other. These words are: water, mother, to get
down, to solve a problem, coal, snow…. In The Drive the words appear and disappear on the
snowy bus window, as on a membrane between physical movements through the real spacetime and parallel symbolic movements within psychological space of dreams.
Bus Kneževo-Osijek, 2010, video-performance, Dopust Performance Festival, Zagreb
Soaked in water and covered with the projection of video recording of the bus drive through
Baranja region, I brushed a part of the screening wall, followed by my recitation of the names
of the villages through which bus passes by. The performance is a dedication to Baranja’s remote villages that nowdays are slowly disappearing from the geographical map.
Baranja by Bus, 2009, video, 12’
Video is filmed with digital camera during a bus ride through Baranja region. The recording
captures an unusual vista seen through the bus window in which the water is accumulated
between the glass panes up to half of its height. During the ride, the water level oscillates creating a moveable line at the eye level that follows the landscape. The line is made apparent
thanks to the agitation of the water caused by the bus movements. The recorded surreal water
filter submerges the melancholy Baranja landscape into a vacillating aquatic space that recalls
the Sea of Pannonia, Baranja’s prehistoric predecessor.
Kato!, 2010, video, 14’
Several of my friends are standing in front of the static camera pronouncing my name in the
form of beckoning: Kato! Video presents an unsuccessful attempt to communicate between
the ‘actual self’ and the ‘lost self’.
Crying Out, 2010, video installation, Gliptoteka HAZU, Zagreb
Crying Out is a continuation of the series of works in which I set off the communication relationship between the two opposed psychological spaces, the conscious, rational, outward directed, with the unconscious, irrational, inward directed. In a single-frame video recording I
cry out myself, exclaiming my name in uneven time intervals and intonation, standing at the
entrance of the dimmed, undescriptive room. I am referring to the life situations in which we
remain trapped within the excessive rational constructs of ego, our constant hurriedness, and
attachment to the visible realm. Simultaneously we are losing the connection with other psychological spaces which possess the essential knowledge about us and the world we exist in,
and that are inaccessible to our conscious, logical, and rational selves.
Lack of Response, 2007, audio installation, Moria Gallery, Starigrad
The work consists of audio recording of me calling out my own name (Kata) in a different time
intervals, and with uneven intonation. The audio recording was installed inside the pool with
ancient stone mosaic in Moria Gallery Starigrad.
Graffito from Florence, 2009, performance-installation, Temple exhibition, Prsten Gallery, HDLU, Zagreb
During the entire duration of the exhibition, every day I would rewrite the sentence Il dio c’e /
The God exists, in water using a paintbrush on the freestanding wall in the Gallery. The sentence remained visible on the wall for a certain interval of time, and then slowly evaporated.
The work is interpretation by the graphite statement Il dio c’e written on the dwelling house
façade in Florence, which I faced almost every day during my stay in the city between 1991
and 1993. Water, here the material of the execution, in comparison with the air we breathe
signifies the other state of consciousness, the one which cannot be lived in, but only visited,
just like the sea depth is visited by divers. At the same time water appears wherever and whenever there is a life. To write Il dio c’e everyday with water aims to confirm that statement everyday and at the same time, to stage its’ repeated disappearing.
Two Dreams, 2009, public space action, Performance Days, Osijek
Two young girls dressed in black and white T-shirts with inscriptions: Markita’s dream or
Snježana’s dream, were handing out leaflets with dreams by Markita Franulić and Snježana
Klarić, at different public spaces in the city of Osijek. Texts of dreams are printed on A5 black
or white paper. Both dreams converse the experience of death in an unusually corresponding
way as though they are surpassing dreamers’ personality and as though they are sending us
the announcement about what the death as mutual experience of all the living beings is actually alike. By handing out the leaflets (which we usually connect with selling and buying activities, and which are usually handed out by young girls), the contrast between so-called
everydays triviality of life and the deep and cognitive nocturne experience of dreaming is emphasized.
Choir, 2009, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
A group of about thirty girl students from The Fifth Grammar School of Zagreb performed single
ten seconds long group screams at the various locations in the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Zagreb, on the occasion of its opening. Screaming of young girls in the Choir performance
to me compares to a sudden breakthrough of the light crying out for awareness and focusing
on here and now. I also consider it a scream of rebellion, nonconsent to conventions. The
teachers in Zen Buddhism use similar procedures to arise the absolute attention of their students and release the body and mind energy flows e.g. during teaching striking a student on
his back by a club suddenly and without any provocation. I also believe that the magical energy
of woman’s scream created energetic initiation and purification of the newly opened MSU galleries.
Screaming, 2009, multimedia installation, PM Gallery, Zagreb
Six videos are projected on six LCD monitors deployed in the space. Each video presents a
different group of pre-school children filmed in single, static frame. Children are standing next
to each other and screaming a few seconds without restraint. Volume of the sound is mollified
to the level of murmur, but in irregular intervals the space is stirred by their loud joint scream
played on the compact disc.
The scream is a primary expression, a primordial fact, communication that goes on at the
edges of language. If language belongs to the field of identification, for only within it the meanings are created, a scream then reflects a state beyond destiny and stereotypes. Children
screaming here signify an expression of existence before belonging, an uninhibited expression
of being, liberated from the established standards and determinations.
Luka and Matej from Branjin Vrh, 2009, video, 6
The video is recorded by a photographic camera, in a home video style. Two boys (my nephews
from Baranja region) are screaming in front of camera in their unrestrained childish exuberance. I consider these screams as a pure joy of being, completely opposite to the iconic 1895
Scream by Edvard Munch’s, which is universally interpreted as reflection of human suffering
and anxiety. It is important to mention that boys were born after the last war in Croatia. Luka
and Matej are new humans who did not experience the war; they are looking to place themselves. In their Biblical names, in their screaming - they are heralds of the new.
Visible / Invisible, 2007, video installation, Barrel Gallery, Zagreb
The dream about the boy with golden eyes is one of my dreams from 1991. In the video, the
text of this dream iteratively appears and disappears from the video recording of a Sunday
ride on the tram. The work creates relation between the two aspects of the world, two parallel
realities; one of them being everyday, banal, visible like tram ride, and the other, transcendental, invisible one, mediated by a dream. The tram ride footage functions as the background
of the text, but it also signifies human life unbroken and moving in time and space. Opposed
to this are the circumstances from the dream, which I see as a glimpse into the otherworldliness, beyond the time and space.
Resume, 2007, performance, MM Centre, Zagreb
The performance is reinterpretation of my dream from 1991 of bringing coal out of a mine as
the resume’ abstract of my dealings with dreams. The account of the dream is: I go down to
the abandoned mine where a heap of coal and a wheel-barrow waits for me. I load coal into
the wheel-barrow and bring it out into daylight. In performance I shift coal in a wheel-barrow
from one to the other side of a stage. The same action is repeated in video projection. The
soundtrack at the end of performance is True Faith by New Order.
Marjan’s Dream, 2005, performance, Insert (Retrospective of Croatian Video Art), Museum of
Contemporary, Art, Zagreb
As the performance begins I take off my shirt and soak it in a blue pot. I put the shirt back
and climb the ladder leaning against the wall. While sitting on the ladder I listen to the audio
recording of the recollection of Marijan Crtalić’s dream, and then I climb down the ladder. Simultaneously, video recording of me climbing up and down the ladder is projected over the
ladder and myself onto the wall. My goal was to create the inspiring environment for audience
to pay attention and listen the reading of the dream. For this purpose I created a scheme with
ladder, where the ladder suggests transcendental, mystical nature of a dream. Drenched shirt
and ‘doubling’ the acts happening in the projection – procedures I also performed in performances Markita’s Dream and Željko’s Dream - signify the attempt to communicate between
conscious-self with unconscious-self, which is necessary to resolve a dream.
Markita’s Dream, 2004, performance, Studio of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
I take off my shirt and drench it in a blue pot, then I put on a wet shirt and write Markita Franulić’s dream in water using a pintbrush on the wall. Previously recorded video of the same
performance but with a dry shirt is simultaneously projected on the wall. The performance
ends while I lean against the wall and listen to the audio recording of the dream, covered with
my own projected image. Like in other performances based on ‘doubling’ the projection, basic
intention is to emphasize and make visible the dualities conscious/unconscious, dream/reality. In this respect, projection in performance signifies the unconscious and the dreamer,
and the actual presence of the performer signifies the conscious awakened ‘me’.
Željko’s Dream, 2004, performance, Karas Gallery, Zagreb
I put on a wet shirt and write the dream by Željko Begić in water and a paintbrush on the wall.
Previously recorded video of this same action with dry shirt is simultaneously projected on the
wall. At the very end the lights go out. Sitting on a chair next to the wall I listen the audio recording of the dream with audience, in the total darkness.
Bread, Brickwork, 2005, installation, Gallery Križić-Roban, Zagreb
The installation is made of loafs of bread that are installed on the floor in a form of a low wall.
Bread and water signify elementary human needs and points toward necessary reduction to
essentials in the raging culture of consumerism that hypnotizes us with abundant supply of
goods. The form of the wall, the barriers of bread, suggests the possibility of endless building
up and in that sense the installation is unfinished. The wall is to hypothetically assume gigantic
proportions. In this hypothetical extention of the wall one can ‘hear’ its social component - the
‘voice’ of the poor.
Selected Dreams - More Real Than Reality, 2004, installation, Karas Gallery, Zagreb
Drying racks loaded with wet laundry - sheets, pillow cases and similar, are installed between
two opposed mirrors at the ground floor of Karas Gallery. Two rows of chairs on which visitors
can sit and listen to the audio recordings of 23 dreams selected and recounted by my friends
and colleagues; are installed between two opposed mirrors on the gallery’s first floor.
Roberto’’s Message, 2003, performance, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb
Illuminated by the black light I write Roberto’s Message on the wall in water . After that I change
the sheets on the bed. I write Robert’s Message on the wall again, but this time in fluorescent
paint. I lie down on the bed and turn off the black light. In total darkness, together with the
audience, I listen to the old Napolitan song Cuore n’gano (Unfaithful Heart) by Roberto Cuciola.
Dream Net, 2001, on-line project, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb
www.g-mk.hr/on-line/dreams
The Dream Net is an interconnected labyrinthlike structure made of 30 dreams I have been
dreaming and writing down from 1991 onwards. Photographs by Zoran Pavelić illustrate the
accounts of the dreams. Navigating through the dreams is possible by keypressing the hypertext to access the other dream. The second method is to select a dream on the schematic
map of the project displayed online in the shape of the molecular structure. The Dream Net
is realized with web designer Ivan Kraljević.
Dream Archive , 2005, on-line project, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb (inactive)
www.g-mk.hr/dreamarchive
The Archive was conceived as a web site where visitors can archive the accounts of their
dreams. The Dream Archive is realized in collaboration with Ivan Kraljević and Miroslav Kraljević Gallery.
Selected Dreams, 2001, ink jet prints on photo paper
The Selected Dreams is a collage of dream accounts with photo portraits of the dreamers.
The series marked the beginning of the Selected Dreams project that became the framework
within which I have been collecting dreams of my friends and acquaintances since 2001.
Some of the dreams from this series became in coming years the basic content and structure
for the diverse body of work executed in different medium. The series present dreams and
photo portraits by: Marijan Crtalić, Boris Cvijetanović, Markita Franulić, Ivan Kožarić, Ivan Kraljević, Vlado Martek, Radmila Iva Janković, Ksenija Turčić, Vlasta Žanić, Daria Torre, Bojana
Švertasek, Branko Franceschi, Silvije Čolić, Silva Kalčić, Jadranka Mlinar, Ružica Zajec, Miloš
Pavković, Božena Končić – Badurina, Duje Jurić, Frane Rogić, Ante Jerković, Sonja Briski –
Uzelac i Željko Tomić.
Selected Dreams, 2002, intervention in public space, Urban Fest, Zagreb
The accounts from the Selected Dreams were printed in white letters on black A4 papers and
placed on the tram stops and shop windows across the city.
Visitation, 2002, interactive CD-rom
Visitation is realized in collaboration with Ivan Kraljević for the Temporary Accommodation exhibition at the Studio of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Visitation is composed
of 14 panoramic photographs of apartments belonging to various Croatian artists. Browsing
and zooming enable visitors to detect a hidden object, an intimate detail of the apartment.
15th image is dedicated to the poem about home, Winter Night, by the Austrian poet Georg
Trakl.
Forsythia, 2002, video 13’
Forsythia was recorded in the yard of the house on Njegoševa Street 11, in Zagreb, where I
lived for a short time. It presents my numerous attempts to break in (to run, to jump, to fly)
into a big yellow bush of forsythia in fool bloom. Each of these entrances ended whit my temporary disappearance it the hearth of the bush, followed by repeated reappearance out of forsythia, and in the new attempts to break in.
Movement, 2002, performance, Sisak
I sit at the table and watch the video projection of my performance titled I am not conscious.
The situation on the stage is almost identical to the one being projected . The shift happens
in the moment when, simultaneously in the projection and in real time, I turn on the cassette
player with the recording of Sarŕa, Sarŕa l’Aurora (Dawn Will Come) by Eros Ramazzotti. Because of a few seconds long lapse, the two recordings clash thus creating a cacophony.
I’am not conscious, 2000, performance, Gallery SC Gallery, Zagreb
I enter the cage carrying a blue pot. I turn on the cassette player in the corner and sit at the
table. After the first notes of the song Sarŕa, Sarŕa l’Aurora (Dawn will come) by Eros Ramazzotti I put the blue pot over my head and continue listening to the song until its end.
The Dreams - 1991, 2001, ambiental installation, Art Gallery Slavonski Brod
In The Dreams – 1991 I have interpreted accounts of the dreams which I had noted during
1991. Accounts of dreams written with black felt pen on transparent nylon are laid on concrete
floor. White columns along the atrium were partially painted black.
Back from the unconsciousness, 1999, performance, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb
With the help of my partner Zoran Pavelić I bring a blue pot full of water in the room. We both
wear scuba diving suits. In the moment in which he leaves the room the soundtrack Don’t fear
the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult starts. I throw water from the pot over everything in the room:
drying rack with laundry, table, bed, pillow, mirror, clothes hanging on a peg, walls and floor.
At the end, I throw the water over the floor towards the audience. What was left after the performance remained exhibited for few more days in the gallery.
Coal from the unconsciousness, 1999, installation, Gallery SC, Zagreb
The installation is composed of a metal cage with a heap of coal inside and overturned wheelbarrow on top of it. It is materialization of my dream about bringing coal out of a mine (see
the account of the dream in the description of Resume’).
RESUME
/essay from the catalogue Parallel life/
In 1991 Kata Mijatović dreamt about descending into a coal mine. In the dream, she
decided to bring coal out, to the daylight. That year, and let’s not forget it is the year
of the beginning of the war, Kata dreamt many more dreams which she carefully noted
and which have become, in the years that followed, an inexhaustible source of her
work as an artist.
She named her performance in the Multimedia centre Resume thus marking it as part
of the series of her dream-staging performances, but also as an event which would
help to summarize and reflect upon her work. In the performance she returned to her
first contact with the scene/object/sign/metaphor of the coal pyramid, which figured
as a trigger for a personal and artistic process that has been in progress since and
whose continuality and meaning is questioned through this act of repetition.
This performance is simultaneously a revision of the author’s installation The coal
from the unconscious, from 1999. In it, the pyramid is literally brought from a dream
into the light, and locked in a cage in the front yard of the Studentski centar Gallery.
It was her first dream-staging: and as if the primary - and private, instance of a dream
staging wasn’t enough, like it demanded a new translation, a new transfer, the artist
upgraded written words with an image, she “returned” them into the image, and by
doing so she captured the dreamt object/sign/metaphor in a cage, depriving it of the
possibility of a new transformation into the unarticulated and unconscious.
In the her later works, the author didn’t deal with the materializations of actual
dreams, but with the attempts to map relations and ways between the conscious and
the unconscious. A recurrent motif is water, a minimal material agent which symbolically performs the transfer and allows the unconsciousness to captivate tangible reality. The 1999 installation What is it like in the unconscious? the artist exhibits
water-wetted paintings made from cut pieces of clothing. In the performance Return
from the unconscious, with the assistance of Zoran Pavelić, the artist, dressed in a
diving suit, with a touch of humor and grotesque, wets the space with water from
a blue pot, another attribute of communication with the unconscious which, like so
many other elements of her performances and installations, transfers and moves to
her other works. Only a year after, in the performance I amnot conscious, at the same
location in the yard of the Studentski centar Gallery where she had earlier performed
Coal from the unconscious, she again placed a cage in which she locked herself this
time, covered her head with a blue pot, ritually listening to an Eros Ramazzoti song,
Sarŕa, Sarŕa l’Aurora (Dawn will come).
In the number of works that followed, Kata Mijatović questioned the possibility of translation and orchestration of memory to the dream content. In 2001, she used the floor
of the open atrium of the Art gallery in Slavonski Brod and put down plastic foils with
her dreams written on it. The work was the starting point for The Dream Net, her first
Internet project, produced by Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, in which she placed those
same dreams in a virtual space and gave them a form of hipertext, a net where all
dreams were intertwined and concept/sign from one dream become a guideline which
opened a gate to another dream. With the performance Selected Dreams in Močvara,
2002, she started the long-term homonymous project in which she shifted attention
from hers to other people’s dreams. This usually took form of the performance, in
which she listened, together with the audience, previously recorded dreams or she
wrote them down with water on the wall. In 2005, this change of interest resulted in
the new Internet project The Dream Archive which invited all the users of the Internet
to record and deposit their dreams in this virtual warehouse.
By the artistic act of naming the work Resume and by using the elements from works
she made in the last seven years, the author turns her own work into a content of the
performance. It was performed in the Multimedia Centre in which - unlike in galleries
or in open spaces - the performing space and the audience were separated, which
added to the theatricality of the performance. The set is made out of the previously
mentioned coal pyramid, a cart, a shovel, and a projection of an identical set and an
identical event in the background which created an illusion of a multiple perspective
distancing and scene multiplication. The artist entered the scene, and with completely
uniform movements accompanied by sharp and dull noises shoveled coal into a cart.
When she filled the cart, she drove it to the opposite, left edge of the stage and she
poured coal onto the floor, returned and repeated the same action until the right side
of the stage was emptied, while on the left side emerged a coal pyramid, identical to
the one from the beginning of the performance. An identical procedure, on the same
set, and with a slight time delay, took place on a projection screen in the background.
The humdrum action and sound produced by it is interrupted before the end of the
performance with music from the speakers: True Faith by New Order. Symmetrical doubling (left-right; reality-illusion) is easily perceived as a basic formal motif of the performance, creating the opposites that are so often seen in Kata Mijatović’ work. But
instead of apparently solid structure and binary quality, it is possible to see this doubling only as a subset of a more general principle which seems to be crucial for Kata
Mijatović’ entire work- repetition. In text-book conditions, “descending”, as Kata Mijatović often calls this process, to the unconsciousness, as if it was the place “where
one can go to and come back with the material evidence for the unconsciousness”
coincides with the Plato’s doctrine of remembering as a cognitive process. According
to Plato, the soul had been once placed into the Eternity where it possessed all the
knowledge about the truth, and the fragments of this knowledge could still be reached
and conceived through a method of remembering. On the other hand, both
Kierkegaard and Lacan question that possibility. Kierkegaard is under the influence
of Christian dogma of the original sin according to which it is impossible to conceive
the truth without the intervention from God. Lacan, in terms of his doctrine of the di-
vided subject denies the possibility of the return and establishes the repetition as a
principle of self - actualization of the subject, claiming the impossibility of the true repetition and making it a part of a paradox that states that it is only possible to repeat
the impossibility of the repetition. In that way, every repetition consists of a shift, a
change, a creation of a new content.
In The Shift, performed in Zadar in 2002, the effect of this change (shift) is indicated:
with a projection of previous performance I am not conscious the artist sit at a desk
and watched a projection of her own work together with the audience, insisting on listening a song by Ramazzotti anew. There, as in many other performances, the song is
a mediator of a potential message from the unconscious and a catalyst of change. In
this way in Resume a symbolically titled song True Faith touches a possible Sisyphus
absurdity of the act of perpetual transmitting/translating substance from one side to
another, one work to another, one dream to another, and also plays with a possible
absurdity of pursuing art, or even absurdity of life itself.
Even though the effect of music in Resume is not without ambiguity and though it flirts
with both possibility of catharsis and survival of the possibility of the absurd, it nevertheless achieves its goal, whichever direction it leads. Resume reminds us that Kata
Mijatović’s entire art could be understood as her Internet project “dream net”’ double- like in that virtual net, it s possible to float over Kata’s artistic world, drawing water
lines that cross, separate and clash given places of individual works, thus fragmenting
and unifying her entire art production at the same time.
In one of her interviews, Kata Mijatović told that, in spite of spending a significant part
of day dreaming, people tend to ignore dreams in everyday life. She joked that people
should not, when they first meet, discuss where did they live and what did they do,
but ask each other about their dreams.
And you? What did you dream about last night?
Ivana Bago
IVANA BAGO - art historian, writer and curator. She is the co-founder (with Antonia Majaca) of DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables, dedicated to research
and publishing in the field of contemporary art and theory. She is the author - in collaboration with Antonia Majaca, the Kontejner collective and individually - of a series
of curatorial, publishing, and research projects and writings (Removed from the Crowd,
2009-; Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards, MUAC, Mexico City, 2012; Spaport Biennial / Where Everything is Yet to Happen, Banja Luka, Zagreb, 2009-2011; The Orange Dog and Other Tales, 2009-, Stalking With Stories, Apexart, New York, 2007),
focusing on the history of art and exhibition practices of the 1960s and 1970s, performance art, feminism, labor, collectivities, self-organization, as well as the contemporary art and politics in the wake of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN/ABOUT THE UNCONSCIOUS:
what does Kata Mijatović dream about?
The awareness of the illusionary wholeness of the subject within itself and of the architectonics of the world is a chronic symptom of contemporaneity, paradoxically resisted by an attempt to form an identity by endlessly multiplying it. According to Renata
Salecl, the roots of being traumatized by the authorities that are not up to their symbolic status are in collision with the mantra of the skillfully packaged demand for selfrealization, as well with the cynical recognition that this demand is impossible. This
anxiety has been deepened by the upsets of AIDS, the unsolved legacy of colonialism
and totalitarianism, the globalization confusion, the promises of ecstatic cancellation
of suffering in cyberspace, or the hope of annulment of consciousness by mutating
into one’s own clone. The crisis schizophrenically culminated in wars, either in a direct
way, as is the case here, or indirectly, by aggressive waves of emigrants and refugees
who threaten the Western “peace” to collapse. In Croatia, the war left physically
maimed and mentally tortured individuals, both literally and metaphorically. As Julia
Kristeva noted, commenting the Balkans situation in a conversation, they definitely
feel that they cannot get the minimum that would allow them to continue living without
being exposed to such mental and physical exhaustion as a consequence of social
and economic uncertainty. Although in the work of Kata Mijatović we immediately notice the very initiation neurosis of the urgency to balance one’s internal and external
beings, one’s conscious and subconscious, or more precisely, unconscious, it is not
possible to read the questioning of the personal while neglecting the experience of
such social reality.
“I am made up of the matter of my dreams”, wrote Gaston Bachelard. Kata Mijatović
says the same thing in her web-work Dream Net (www.miroslav-kraljevic.hr/dreams)
(2001), in which she combines short descriptions of her dreams from 1991 with photographs which her partner Zoran Pavelić has been taking during the last ten years.
Plowed fields, an umbrella in an empty room, a tidy bed; these scenes are not devoid
of a sense of rejection, a residue of nostalgia, and of melancholy, but only when they
slowly fade out from the screen into a blackness from which emerge words that describe a dream, the story really becomes a web of fragments of the artist’s subjectivity.
The title itself, which contains the word “web”, followed by the web design by Ivan Kraljević - the work is initiated by a scheme resembling a molecular structure, circles numbered 1 to 30, which is the number of the dreams, and of the lines connecting them
- suggests a navigation without a definite beginning or end. Moreover, after a while,
tracking the work becomes more conditioned by the internal logic of the work than we
could control and make our choices. We delve deeper and deeper into streams of subconsciousness, and we don’t know if it is the artist’s or ours. When Rosalind E. Kraus
analyzes the role and the meaning of the notion of web in art, she lucidly notes how
its nonlinear structure, from the structuralist viewpoint resembles a mythical one, or,
if we talk about psychoanalysis, it resembles the structure of the subconscious. As we
have already said, Kata Mijatović appropriates both viewpoints, by choosing the title
of the work, and choosing her visual material - for instance, when she invokes the
legacy of romanticism using a version of a web, a window. The window - locus of the
reconstitution of the being, according to Krauss - is closed in one of the dreams; a
curtain is drawn over it. Contrary to this scene, in which the camera is characteristically
aimed from the room to the window, in the second scene we see the artist standing
in the open, and behind her, windows, both open and shut, filling half the cadre. In
one of the dreams, a window offers a dim view of the kitchen, and this scene is labeled
by a text containing a maternal reference, which is not insignificant. Personal mythology and the subconscious intertwine.
I sit in the kitchen, in the old house; mymama is here, standing by the stove and watching through the window. It is dark outside; the sky is far away and full of stars. I approach the window and I see two stars falling, I loudly say that now one should make
a wish (I am sure that my wish will be fulfilled), and at the same moment I notice a
hole opening in the sky, black on the dark blue background of the sky. In fear, it comes
to my mind that one of the stars did it, but the scene slowly changes and I understand
that what I see is not night sky, but an improvised wooden façade, a screen with a
hole in the middle.
When she speaks about the states of crisis and fragmentation - both of the artist and
of the esthetic object - Julia Kristeva asserts that, to talk about artistic work as an expression of these states, we must invoke the experience of psychoanalysis. Freud’s
conception of the unconscious as our hell, Kristeva concludes, is crucial to the notion
that the crisis cannot be separated from the human being. Kata Mijatović locates her
project on the vague border between the conscious and the unconscious; as with an
inverted glove, she plays with possibility to equate the illogicalities of dreams with the
experienced everyday life. And the everyday, narrated thorough a dream, is gloomy
and uncertain, and contrary to dreams, it does not imply the relief of waking up. It
seems that the journey thorough the labyrinths of dreams is a frantic browsing the
tangled areas of consciousness, as well as a comment of the nightmarish reality. This
is precisely why Dream Net is not completely hermetic; a collective memory is woven
into it, in which everyone is invited to recognize one’s own levels of consciousness,
conditioned psychologically and socially.
Kata Mijatović realized this purpose most transparently in her project Selected Dreams
(2002), which she presented in three separated units. In Močvara club in Zagreb, she
presented a performance in which she was sitting on a ladder, inside a cage, and together with the audience she was watching the projection of the texts and photographs
from Selected Dreams. But, while she based the Dream Net exclusively on her own
dreams, now it is about recorded dreams and private photo-portraits of Ivan Kožarić,
Marijan Crtalić, Ksenija Turčić, Vlasta Žanić…
I dreamt about meeting a painter, a friend of mine who had died not long before (Fruk).
I met him on the beach from Fellini’s dolce vita. Surprised to see him, I greeted him
cordially and asked him how it was over there. He answered it was fine. Somehow unhappy with the answer, I continued to ask: “Well, what do you do, do you paint?” He
said he did paint and that everything was somehow similar to “down there”. The only
difference was that there were no systems of values. I explained this to myself, then
and many times after that - so, there is no good and bad, up and down, beautiful and
ugly, black and white, nor blue and red… etc./Vlasta Žanić/
The experience was deepened by Gershwin’s Summer Time, song by Ella Fitzgerald
and Janis Joplin. The second presentation of Selected Dreams, in Hannover, is a shift
from the Self to the Other. Lit by a spotlight, the artist was reading the dreams of her
friends, and the translator was sitting in the dark part of the stage, translating the text
into German. Again, Bachelard comes to mind - “Vision tells too many things at once.
The being does not see itself. Maybe listens to itself.” Therefore, the dreams were
spoken, and the music, which is for Kata Mijatović what is madeleine for Proust, was
replaced by voices, thus multiplying their meaning and reception - through experiencing the two colors, the rhythm of the voices, intertwining the two languages that not
everyone in the audience understood, and, of course, thorough the presence of the
author and the translator, acting either as catalysts or as hindrances for the reception.
At the Urban festival in Zagreb last summer, Kata Mijatović was putting the prints of
Selected Dreams on tram stations and bookstore windows. On this occasion, she says,
passers-by were taking the texts that had just been exhibited and leaving with them.
This poses some new questions, which will, at the least, directly provoke suppositions
that, when Kata Mijatović speaks about herself, she speaks about the Other, that is,
that she never stops to contemplate the outside where she/Other resides. In this way,
the perception of private and public work is being distorted; it is being reactivated also
as a critical manifesto of reality, but always from a distance and only provisionally. For
example, speaking about presenting Selected Dreams on the street, one could speculate about whether the public really became sensible for art, or is it only consumer
ideology of accepting everything that is offered, and finally, is the artist herself interested in these interpretations at all. Is she intrigued by how many people have read,
let alone decided to keep a paper offering them a dream, and not an invitation to a
demonstration or to join a yoga class? Kata Mijatović is interested in communication;
she insists that one should consciously cooperate with the unconscious, because it
never lies. The Dream Net originated in cooperation with Miroslav Kraljević Gallery,
based on K+Z installation (2001), presented in Galerija umjetnina in Slavonski Brod,
where Zoran Pavelić had his exhibition simultaneously. The artist’s texts, handwritten
on a transparency, were laid out on the floor and on the walls, while the upper parts
of columns in the backyard were painted white, and the lower, black, thus alluding to
the binarity of yin and yang, earth and sky, night and day, dream and wake. A happy
coincidence - the best that happened, Kata Mijatović revealed in a conversation with
Željko Jerman, was that rain began to sprinkle “my dreams” - was a sign that dreaming
could actually be a state of awareness, contrary to the desensitized state of wake. In
accordance to the practice in the 90s, which largely leans on the feministart of Susan
Hiller, Annette Messager or Martha Rosler, but Kata Mijatović, disillusioned and rejecting any political angle, is primarily oriented towards self-examination. Aware that
the attempt was impossible, she searches for the primal fragments of the self, aiming
to articulate at least a part of the truth about being in crisis. As we have already
pointed out, works by Kata Mijatović are not deaf to the social context in which they
originate.
In Temporary Accommodation (2002), a project that she realized with Zoran Pavelić
for the Museum of Contemporary Art, she touched the theme of war, perhaps in the
most direct way, as well as refugees, and everyday life in which artists are marginalized
and deprived of possibilities to make a living by doing their work. However, the tenant
status that she and her partner are bound to endure, or the experience of refugee
status of their families, are themes that the artist presents from her peculiar poetic
angle. In Forsythia video, realized in this occasion, she finds inspiration in the blue
flower in the back garden of a rented apartment. We see her trying to enter, she starts
toward it twenty-odd times, and every time she disappears in a dash of it. Did the attempt to enter/move into the apartment succeed, or her constant efforts and vanishings suggest that such a wish is only an illusion? At the same time, the web work Visit
(www. katamijatovic. mi2.hr), offers to enter her and Pavelić’s home, and the homes
of thirteen of their friends - Marija and Zlatko Kopljar, Tomislav Gotovac, Markita Franulić and Boris Cvjetanović, Branka Stipančić and Mladen Stilinović, Marijan Molnar,
etc. Among them is Georg Trakl, whose poetic greatness, which ended in a schizophrenic cocaine- induced dream at the onset of World War I, is a permanent inspiration for Kata Mijatović.
In the texts within the Dream Net, certain words are emphasized by color-coding - coal,
narrow passage, feather, light, snow, dust, night - or, otherwise - I am lying, I am sitting,
I am seeing. The artist systematizes, she makes a list of her personal vocabulary that
she started in a series of earlier projects; among them was The Life of Trakl installation
(1997). Presented in Zagreb Nova gallery, it was based on three elements forming a
triangle - a black cardboard box on one wall, a white shirt on the other, and on the
floor, a circle of salt with a glass of water in the center. The materials used, as the
artist herself says, are actually embodied words. As she describes, the black ink she
used to color the box means silence to her, a cessation of empty talk about war and
politics. The salt and the glass of water symbolize desire, a thirst for silence that she
equals with poetry. Kata Mijatović argues that the conscious can approach the unconscious only in the language of poetry.
When the night fell, Father became an old man; in the gloomy house, Mother’s face
hardened, and the boy felt the damnation of a depraved family. Sometimes he would
reminisce about his childhood, in which there were many illnesses, horrors and darkness, secret games in the starry garden, and feeding rats in the gloomy backyard. The
slim figure of his sister would get out of the blue mirror and he would collapse into
the darkness, as if he were dead. His mouth would pop like a red fruit, and the stars
would shine over his silent sorrow. His dreams filled the ancient house of the ancestors. At dusk, he would wander on a neglected graveyard, or watch the corpses in a
gloomy mortuary, green patches of decay on their beautiful hands. At the gates of a
convent, he asked for a piece of bread; a shadow of a sparrow appeared from the
darkness and startled him. When he was lying in his cold bed, he wept unutterable
tears. But there were nobody to put a hand on his forehead.
Trakl did not endure the damnation of the exiled form Eden, said Kata Mijatović, explaining her exhibition entitled Preparations (1998) for Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. With its six installations, it was a continuation of The Life of Trakl and of
earlier Desire (1996), presented in Dubrovnik Otok gallery. In this installation - it consisted of a large square, painted in black ink on a newspaper, and of a circle made of
salt – the artist, annoyed with politics, had already stepped on the territory of silence,
the only acceptable space of distance from direct, ineffective participation. In Preparations, assembling the installations from the whiteness of feathers, canvas, salt,
glass, and water, the artist suddenly puts the warmth of wood within the loud whisper
of the embodied words, as a powerful counterpoint. In this way, the sober discretion
of the materials is broken by a strong emotional incursion, a remembrance of childhood, when “Grandpa was beautifully arranging chopped wood”.
In her projects before Dream Net and Written Dreams, Kata Mijatović also materializes
her personal vocabulary, made from dreams/remembrances. Her installation Coal
from the subconscious (1999), inspired by a dream from 1989, which consisted of a
cage and a heap of coal inside it, with a handcart in upside-down position on top of it,
she presented in the open, near the Zagreb Student Center. The cage, which was to
be used again in performances I am not Conscious (2000) and Shift (2002), signifies
reality, or as the artist says, the consciousness. “I wanted it to look as I really descended to the mineshaft of the subconscious, dug out three tons of coal and put it
in a cage - the conscious”, she writes. In this installation, and in the performances,
Kata Mijatović also deals with oppositions of warm-cold and consciousness- subconsciousness. She impregnates the rationality of consciousness with love, a yearning
for home, which we recognize in her materials: flowers, wood, coal, fire. Freud is on
the scene.
Das das Kind an seinem Bette steht, ihn an Arme fast, und ihm vorwurfsvoll zuraunt:
Vater, siehst du denn nicht, dass ich verbrenne?
As a sequel to Coal from the subconscious, in ambient installation Back from the Unconscious (1999) in Zagreb Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, the artist added new wordsmaterializations to the longing to dive into the unconscious: she put scissors into a blue
pot and filled it with water, and she presented the fabric of her cut-out clothes, also
infused with water, as a series of canvases. As in the most of her other projects, the
sense of hearing plays a part, too - the viewer hears water splashing. To further examine the theme she treated in Coal from the subconscious, to open the door of the unconscious, Kata Mijatović returns to SC and performs I am not conscious - in a closed
cage, she sits at a table covered with a white tablecloth, with the blue pot, which she
had used before, on her head. Her persevering urge to understand, to hear and to feel
is almost painful; in her performance Shift, presented in Zadar, he silently stands beside the very same table and watches its video projection. Sara l’Aurora, a song by
Eros Ramazzotti, provides the sense of sweet and sour nostalgia - Morning will come
/ there is a hope / everything will change / you only have to believe/.
How it is in the Unconscious? (1999), a performance she presented with Zoran Pavelić
in Zagreb Gradska Gallery is not based on a dream, but is inspired by remembrances
from childhood. But, do we manage to tell the one from the other?
In the backyard of my grandmother’s house in Branjina, near the entrance gate, beside the rusty wire fence, grass and weed on the other side, there was an old, narrow
well, covered with moss. It had no covering, and one would get water from it using a
tin bucket, hanging at the end of a long rope. The bucket rested on a brick surface,
and the free end of the rope hung over the wire fence. You would drop the bucket in
the well using the rope. First you would hear a thump on the surface of the water,
then a splash, and then you would slowly rotate the bucket until it was full. The hands
would feel the weight and start pulling the rope, and the bucket would bump into the
slippery, green walls of the well and spill over some water, making the moss wet. On
the edge of the opening, from the inner side, a wild rose bush was growing between
the bricks, and its flowers were always wet. When the bucket or a human hand
touched the flowers, you could see the white flowers and green serrated leaves moving
in the dark water mirror. In summertime we often happened to draw buckets full of
water with wild rose petals floating on its surface.
The awareness that we have lost the protection of childhood forever, reinforced by losing one’s home, amounts to cutting the umbilical cord connecting us with ourselves;
a realization, as Boltanski says, that we all have a dead child lying inside us. When
Kata Mijatović for her performance installs a table with slices of bread, a glass and a
plate, as well a bed, a mirror, and monochromatic canvases, she once again asks “who
am I?”, measuring the permeability of borders between remembrances and dreams.
Their overlapping mutates into a hallucinatory performance, a theatre of the absurd
that, in real time and space, inarticulately mumbles not about remembering, but about
experiencing the experience of remembering. Dressed in diving suits, Kata Mijatović
and Zoran Pavelić spill water from big blue pots on everything that is presented, trying
to reestablish the broken circuit between the inside and the outside, between parts
of consciousness and subconsciousness that might confirm the subject. As well as in
her other works, the artist postpones the reconciliation of identity split. She is aware
of the failure. Appearing in a diving suit, and inviting her partner to do the same, she
in a comical way performs a ritual game without a solution, to the very exhaustion.
Moreover, in the same way as in her other works - for instance, when she puts a pot
on her head, or sits anonymously among the viewers, looking at her own work, or when
she, under a spotlight, reads other people’s dreams, presuming that the Hannover
audience did not understand it - now she leads an intimate conversation with her own
personal past and the trauma of separation from innocence that she hopes to find in
the unconscious. Using the tactics of constant avoidance, Kata Mijatović nonviolently
leads the viewer to do the same action. By letting go, we learn more about ourselves
than the artist had ever told us about herself.
Ružica Šimunović
RUŽICA ŠIMUNOVIĆ - Art historian and ethnologist (Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences of Zagreb); since 2002 creative producer of the Movement of the Point
broadcast on HR 1 and since 2012 host at the Guest Editor broadcast on HR 2 of The
Croatian Radio. Author of the monograph Zoran Pavelić: Political Speech is Suprematism (published by PLEH, 2013). Winner of the AICA Croatia Award for art critique
(2011).
KATA MIJATOVIC Biography
Kata Mijatovic is multimedia artist who works primarily in the medium of performance and video. She
was born in 1956 in Branjina, Croatia. From 1988 to 1991 she was a member of the informal art group
Mocvara/Swamp. From 1991 to 1993 she studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence,
Italy. From 1993 to 1996 she continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia,
where she graduated in 1997. From 2005 to 2009 she was a member of the Art board of the Baranja
Art Colony/BUK. Since 2005 she is managing the AZ Gallery, located at the Atelieri Zitnjak, Zagreb
www.a-z.hr. Since 2007 she is a member of the Art group PLEH. Kata Mijatovic lives and works in Zagreb,
Croatia.
Contact: [email protected], more about artist: www.arhivsnova.hr
Selected exhibitions and projects 2012 - 2000
2012 Everybody Knows…, performance, Performance Art Festival, Osijek, Croatia
2012 Dreams from the Underpass, Dogadjanja Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2011 The Look of Resistance, with Vlasta Zanic, No Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
2011 Plexus, Galzenica Gallery, Velika Gorica, Croatia
2011 Greetings from Baranja,with Zoran Pavelic, Kooh-i-nor Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
2010 The Calling, Gliptoteka HAZU, Gallery IV, Zagreb, Croatia
2010 Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
2009 Choir, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
2009 Two Dreams, performance, Performance Art Festival Dopust, Split, Croatia
2009 Baranja Bus, BUK 2009, Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2009 Screaming, Ring Gallery HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia
2009 Temple, Ring Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2008 Luka and Matej from Branjin Vrh, Gallery Prozori, Zagreb, Croatia
2008 Visible / Invisible, Mali Salon, Rijeka, Croatia
2007 Echo, with Zoran Pavelić, Moria Gallery, Stari Grad, Croatia
2007 Kunst ist ein deutsches Wort, with Zoran Pavelić, Studioausstellung, Dusseldorf, Germany
2007 Visible / Invisible, Bacva Gallery, HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia
2006 Visitation, MMC Kuglana, Koprivnica, Croatia
2006 Resume, performance, MMC, Zagreb, Croatia
2005 Marijan's Dream, performance, Karas Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2005 Dream Archive, online project for Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2004 Building, Krizic-Roban Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2004 Markita's Dream, performance, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
2004 Željko's Dream, performance, Karas Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2004 Selected Dreams - More Real Than Reality, Karas Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia,
2003 Selected Dreams, Ghetto Gallery, Split, Croatia
2003 Robert's Message, performance, Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2003 Forsythia, Matica Hrvatska Gallery, Krizevci, Croatia
2002 Temporary Accommodation, with Zoran Pavelic, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
2002 Selected Dreams, performance, Club Mocvara, Zagreb, Croatia
2001 Dream net, online project, Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, www.g-mk.hr/online/dreams
2001 Dreams - 1991, ( K+Z,), Art Gallery, Slavonski Brod, Croatia
2000 Back from the Unconsciousness, performance, Kazamat Gallery, Osijek, Croatia
2000 I Am Not Conscious, performance, SC Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia