Secret Exhibition

Why exhibitions in the apartments?

The main motivation for organizing exhibitions in the apartments rises from the fact that the vast majority of art institutions in Croatia have conservative approach which is not able to keep up with contemporary art practices, which is why an alternative art scene is developing initiated by various curator/artists collectives. Organizing exhibitions in apartments is concieved as an attempt of institutional critique, and also as a kind of a statment that shows how the only way for us as (a group of) young curators to work on a project that we consider to deal with relevant issues is through non-institutionalized self-organization. Thus we decided to use appartments, as spaces that are easily available for us because of their private character, for public acting and engagement.

Why secret exhibitions?

The idea of using private apartments as exhibiting places is also connected with a thematic frame that links all exhibitions – and that is censorship. The main theme this project deals with is censorship in visual arts after 1989. How does the censorship functions nowadays in the field of visual arts? Who is censoring, and why? What are the reasons for censoring, what kind of subjects/approaches are most likely to be censored? Which are the control mechanisms of production of meaning that govern the distribution and visibility of art works? The main thesis on which this project is based is that notion of censorship and the way it operates has been radically changed in the past 20 years, and that censorship has become widespread, yet camouflaged and almost invisible, just as ideological positions from which censorship is imposed have become blurred, interchangeable, and hard to locate because of their omnipresence.

Curators: Irena Boric, Ivana Hanacek, Ana Krsinic Lozica