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Art and Social Agency in a State of (Post)Transition

Numerous parallels can be drawn between museums’ active engagement in society and various artistic explorations, both within or outside museum institutions. This paper presents two artworks that bear characteristics of the social turn in art and correspond to some of the main tenets of sociomuseology. Based on these pieces, the paper examines the relationship between the two concepts within the institutional contexts of two different museums and discusses the role of art (and the artists) as a catalyst of both social and institutional change. The artworks capture multiple changed realities in the social fabric that have emerged from the Croatian (post)transitional landscape fraught with catastrophic political and economic management and malpractices, which have left many people uncertain of their future wellbeing and possessing skill sets that have rarely been adapted to the new circumstances. Ana Horvat’s Re:member is an interactive audio- visual installation, which was created as part of the project Tailored Futures, organised and presented through display at Zagreb’s Nikola Tesla Technical Museum. It is a patchwork made in collaboration with female textile industry workers and accompanied by recorded stories of their former working experiences and existential struggles. Kristina Leko’s How people live – A Report on Passivity is an art work organised in a form of exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, which served as a stage for a series of discussions on poor socio-economic conditions and entailed collaboration in both the art creation and its mediation by different social groups and with different objectives. The social value of the art works stems from the collaborative artistic process, though, in terms of their museological role, they show differences and similarities, which this paper aims to unpack. Regardless of their different form - one a social event shaped into an object, and the other an exhibition as process, they disrupt the ossified taxonomies and discourses that communicate universal values of material culture and drive museums into an active engagement in social issues. However, the works are differently shaped around the concept of participation, in terms of the manner in they facilitate agency and foster self-discovery, empowerment and claims for recognition, and the manner in which the artworks and the display act as interfaces between the museums, the artist, collaborators and museum visitors.

conceptual art ; participatory art ; sociomuseology ; Ana Horvat ; Kristina Leko

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