engleski

Shifting Geographies: Mutability of Croatia's Artistic Geography in the 1990's

The paper examines the social construction of space by way of analyzing the discourse on art and the place of Croatian art after 1990. The disintegration of former communist regimes in Europe marked the beginning of a ”long decade” of optimism and faith in a ”new Europe”, which would – after decades of separation – finally be able to act on an united, ”post- ideological” front. The changed political geography of Europe had its repercussions in the art world as well, as exemplified by exhibitions such as the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Paris, 1989), aimed at showing ”the true multiculturalism of the world”, a series of exhibitions marked by the desire to bridge the gap between knowledge on art in the West and the (former) East (i.e. Europa, Europa!, Bonn, 1994), the establishment of the Manifesta biennial, or by the creation of different formal and informal networks that would – due to the advent of the Internet and increased travelling opportunities – serve as platforms for cross-cultural dialogue. The central agent in the new, borderless Europe and the globalized world was the “cultural nomad”, a concept elaborated by Achille Bonito Oliva on the occasion of the Venice biennial in 1993 which gave testimony to the presumption that it was finally possible to talk about art without geographical borders. According to this logic, the confined space of the nation-state is no longer adequate to explain the interconnectedness of places on a global level. However, the political geography of Croatia in the 1990s – characterized by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the war that ensued – brought about the formation of several overlapping artistic spaces, sometimes contradictory in nature, that reveal the tension between the globalized, borderless world, and a newly formed nation-state eager to defend its borders – literally and symbolically. The paper discusses this tension between the global and the local (that is to say – national) by analyzing the evolution of spatial concepts that came to the fore during the 90’s especially in the writings on Croatian participation in large-scale international exhibitions (the Venice biennial, Manifesta and Documenta), which demonstrate the shift in self-perception from a non-aligned to a peripheral position, and compares the international representation of Croatia in these exhibitions with the sometimes conflicting spaces of artistic geography in Croatia.

1990's, global art, global art history, large-scale international exhibitions

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