<font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">° </span><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">You are kindly invited to attend<span>
</span></span></b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">| </span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">5 September – 2
October 2012 </span></font><div class="gmail_quote">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""> </span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""> <br>
</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Opening:
</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">4 September</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">, 19.00 pm.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Project
curator: </span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Branka Stipančić</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Participating
artists:</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Boris Cvjetanović</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Mangelos</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Vlado Martek</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Dalibor Martinis</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Mladen Stilinović</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:28.5pt"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Goran Trbuljak<br>
Josip Vaništa</span></font><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></p>
<font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""></span></font>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">In
1962 in Zagreb Josip Vaništa, the head of Gorgona Group, sent an invitation to
fifty addresses culled from the address book of Studio G. The invitation read
as follows: “You are kindly invited to attend” without saying where or why they
were invited. The invitation card mentioned practically nothing specific, only
this text, a simple thought: invitation to Nothing. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">The
work speaks of absence and silence. Silence, as Susan Sontag says in her famous
essay “Aesthetics of Silence”, is only one element in a work of art. “As long
as a human eye is looking, there is always something to see. To look at
something which is ‘empty’ is still to be looking, still to be seeing something
– if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations. In order to perceive fullness,
one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness which marks it off…” The
statement “You are invited…” makes use of a social convention too, in order to distort
it and to function subversively in art. By inserting itself into the very
structure of the way the gallery works, it criticizes it from within.<span> </span>The work is entirely outside the pictorial
tradition and opens up many questions about the gallery context.<span> </span>At the same time, it is a neo-Dada
provocation that confuses, and a conceptual action that raises the basic
questions: what, where and why?<span> </span></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">The
works have been chosen on the basis of the concept of either absence or
emptiness, as well as on the notion that the works are defined via the elements
of the artistic context. Accordingly works from the following artists from
Zagreb have been selected: <span> </span>Mangelos, a member
of the Group Gorgona which was active in Zagreb in the 1960s, and the works by
the generation of Conceptual and Postconceptual artists:<span> </span>Goran Trbuljak, Dalibor Martinis, Mladen Stilinović,
Vlado Martek, and Boris Cvjetanović. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Mangelos,
an art historian, a critic and curator, who was at same time an artist, started
his career in the postwar period with the groups of works: <i>Tabule rasae</i>, <i>Negation de la
peinture</i> and <i>school slates</i> (blacks
monochromes surfaces with text underneath) which express a state of oblivion
and the setting for a new beginning. Goran Trbuljak explores the relationship between
the artists and the gallery system. His poster work <i>Retrospective</i> (1981) in effect includes three of his solo shows,
each of which consisted of a single exhibited poster, with the following statements:
<i>I don’t want to show anything new and
original</i>; <i>The Fact that someone has a
chance to make an exhibition is more important that what will be exhibited at
that exhibition</i>; <i>With this exhibition
I am demonstrating the continuity of my work</i>. In his installation <i>Artist at Work</i> (1978) Dalibor Martinis
sets up the conditions in which his work will be realized by itself, while
Mladen Stilinović in the series of photographs with the same title (1978) puts
up the idea that work of an artist is hard to quantify; furthermore, the artist
glorifies the concept of laziness in the practice of art. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">There
is negation and, at the same time, analytical approach to the poetry in Vlado
Martek’s <i>Pre-poetry</i> works from the 1980s:
the Sonnets keep the poetic form but discard the poetic content. Two video
tapes, <i>No Title (Cut)</i> by Trbuljak and
<i>Open Reel</i> by Martinis (both from
1976), explore the medium and its boundaries to the point when it does not
function any more. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Photographs
<i>Graffiti</i> (1986–87) by the artist Boris
Cvjetanović record street graffiti – the “fight” between the graffiti artists
and the state, which also secretly and anonymously “corrects” the graffiti at
night – underlying ideological and social context in which all these works have
been created, in order not to neglect or forget it when close-reading these
works. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">supported by</span></b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">:</span><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> <br>
</span></b></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span lang="DE-AT"><br></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span lang="DE-AT">BM:UKK</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"><br>
</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">ERSTE Foundation</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7<span style></span></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></b></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">kind support provided by:</span></b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">MUMOK</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> - Museum Moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Wien</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE
Foundation</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></b></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">About
us:</span></b></font></p>
<p><font><span>Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the
rest of the week days by appointment only. Admission
free </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Open
Systems </span></b></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Zentrum für
Kunstprojekte</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Lassingleithnerplatz
2</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">A- 1020 Vienna</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Austria</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">(+43) 699 115 286 32</span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"></span><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">for more info: <a href="mailto:office@openspace-zkp.org" target="_blank">office@openspace-zkp.org</a> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.openspace-zkp.org">http://www.openspace-zkp.org</a></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><font><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font><b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US">Open Systems</span></b><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"" lang="EN-US"> - Zentrum
für Kunstprojekte aims to create the most vital facilities for art concerned
with contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects
on the basis of improving new approach.</span></font></p>
</div>