Artists: Paweł Althamer, Mária Bartuszová, Pavel Brăila, Geta Brătescu, Boris Cvjetanović, Josef Dabernig, Marijan Detoni, Stanisław Dróżdż, Nika Dubrovsky, Róza El-Hassan, Miklós Erdély, Tim Etchells, VALIE EXPORT, Stano Filko, Heinz Gappmayr, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Tina Gverović & Siniša Ilić, Sanja Iveković, Julije Knifer, Daniel Knorr, Běla Kolářová, Július Koller, Jiří Kovanda, Ivan Kožarić, Edward Krasiński, Paweł Kwiek, Katalin Ladik, Victoria Lomasko, Karel Malich, David Maljković, Dorit Margreiter, Vlado Martek, Dalibor Martinis, Dóra Maurer, Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch, Paul Neagu, OHO, Roman Ondak, Boris Ondreička/ Ján Zavarský/ Vit Havranek, Neša Paripović, Cora Pongracz, Nedko Solakov, Margherita Spiluttini, Tamás St. Auby, Mladen Stilinoviċ, Sven Stilinović, Petr Štembera, Raša Todosijević, Slaven Tolj, Milica Tomić, Goran Trbuljak, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Lois Weinberger, Heimo Zobernig, Želimir Žilnik

By summarizing previous investigations, the sixth episode is staged as the project’s finale at the Home of the Croatian Association of Artists/HDLU, where incidentally the first WHW exhibition took place in 2000 under the title What, How & for Whom,on the occasion of the 152^nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, setting the course of all our future activities.

The sixth episode also includes the two key project venues for the previous episodes – Apartment Softić and Gallery Nova. After a number of dispersed presentations throughout the city, the choice of HDLU as a main venue for the final episode was strategic: its size enables us to create a direct dialogue among the large number of works from the Kontakt Art Collection, and just a brief glimpse at its history sheds a significant light on the interconnectedness of art institutions and social circumstances. HDLU is, after all, one of the most historically laden buildings in Zagreb. (1)

The exhibition display structures in HDLU were conceptualized by David Maljković and Ana Bakić. Rather than trying to appease the tensions that often form between contemporary artworks and the circular space of the Meštrović Pavilion, whose architecture, in its majestic neo-classicism, was already anachronistic when it was built, they decided to confront its difficulties directly. In this exhibition, Maljković’s artistic methodologies of creating an estrangement effect through “unsuitable” spatial constellations and the dislocation of the spectator’s expectations are visible at the very entrance to the Ring Gallery, where the imposing presence of a large counter-intuitively positioned wall requires visitors to immediately “choose a side”, and emphasises the impossibility of easily grasping the exhibition in its totality. In other exhibition areas, works are placed on fragments of earlier exhibition structures that have been torn down and built upon, transfigured and transformed, and there is an impression of being amidst the process of dissolving and rebuilding.  

The final stage of the project in Zagreb does not attempt to tie up loose ends or provide answers to questions posed by previous episodes. At the facade, over the entrance to the building, visitors are greeted by Question Mark Cultural Situation (U.F.O.) by Július Koller, announcing the exhibition’s openness to different interpretations, and its accentuation of poetic lines of inquiry. Issues of openness, processuality and the translation of personal ontologies into proposals for collective action are explored at Gallery Bačva in HDLU in the installation White Space in a White Space, developed by Stano Filko with Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarsky, which will be installed during the opening by Boris Ondreička, Vit Havranek and Ján Zavarsky. The Cakes by Mladen Stilinović creates a trail, or an invitation, to the upper floor galleries. The practice of creating unexpected juxtapositions, introduced in earlier episodes, continues here, and many of the works that were shown previously, such as the sculptures of Mária Bartuszová or the blue line by Edward Krasiński, are exhibited again in different constellations. Repurposing and the dehierarchization of content and of the art object, used as a method by many artists in the exhibition is taken as one of the principles of the set-up as a whole – one of the projection boxes designed by Josef Dabernig for his exhibition at Gallery Nova in the fourth episode is transferred to HDLU and, following discussion with the artist, repurposed for the display of works by other artists.

The sixth episode is conceived as an invitation for a simultaneous look into both past and future.  At the Apartment Softić, Tina Gverović and Siniša Ilić continue their collaboration that started in 2006 and create an environment that challenges the idea of belonging or not belonging to a particular place, culture, people. Their Collage from the Highway reconfigures the layout of Apartment Softić, wrapped in a kind of historical bubble, to evoke the flow of people and material through space and through limited, fleeting time. Probing the contradiction between a need for being located and a requirement to be constantly “on the move”, their works attempt to disturb the political, economic and social narrative conveyed through the seemingly safe and enclosed space of a private apartment, conflating its past, present and future though the experience of a journey, and people moving en masse. 

The past that projected itself toward a better future, yet ended in war, is revisited at Gallery Nova, where works by Boris Cvjetanović, Milica Tomić and Želimir Žilnik are shown. By dealing with the traumatic blind spots of Yugoslav society, the exhibition cautiously charts the way in which suppressed economic conflicts, aggravated by global crisis and industrial trends of the 1970s and 1980s, boiled over in violent identitarian politics and armed conflict in Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

The final stage of My sweet little lamb (Everything we see could also be otherwise) will take place in The Showroom in London in autumn 2017, serving as the project’s poetic epilogue. Using multiples, photocopies and facsimiles, it will look into the possibilities of using experimental and open exhibition structures to revive the anti-systemic and anti-commodity strategies of artistic production of the time when many of the seminal works included in the Kontakt collection were made. It will be a fitting end to a project named after a work by Mladen Stilinović, referring to his practice of creating artist books, but also other works, as open editions. Stilinović’s humorous approach and sense for poetry and its ability to resettle the habitual relationship between the viewer and the viewed, has served as a guiding principle of the whole project, and as an open invitation to try to see otherwise, or to see more clearly through the surrounding opacity and paradoxes of the times in which we live.

[1] It was designed by Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović and opened as an art space called House of the Visual Arts of King Peter I the Great Liberator in 1938. The name was shed just a few years later when the building was turned into a Mosque by the Croatian Nazi puppet state during WW2. Under socialism, it was the Museum of Socialist Revolution until 1990 when it was emptied of historical content and brought back to its current function as a Kunsthalle, most recently referred to as Meštrović Pavilion.