The gaze is an elastic concept.

In everyday communication, it serves to identify spatial relations, other people’s facial expressions, weather conditions, or anything else discernible to the eye.

In film and, more broadly, new media theory, it conveys the attention of a subject informed by a specific identity.

The gaze is read from a static or moving image, but also from a narrative perspective, where the choice of focalization changes what and how the reader sees and knows.

Perspective reflects an attitude, as well as a worldview, principles, and values.

The exhibition Tuning the Gaze brings together three new artworks that invite us to understand the gaze not as a neutral act of observing, but as a process of construction –material, emotional, and socially mediated. Here, tuning denotes a fine adjustment – a shift, calibration, alignment – revealing layers of perception. Each work examines how the gaze is formed, reflected, and refracted through material, light, and the body.

In the installation $before&after$, Lara Ana Kulenović explores the processes of (re)construction within contemporary rituals of self-care and the aestheticization of the body. The work’s initial idea stems from an impulse to direct the production budget toward herself – not in the sense of experience, but self-representation. The artist embarks on an inquiry into the gaze that observes not only the body, but also how it is constructed, displayed, and evaluated through self-perception. Silicone casts of the face and nails, extensions made from shed hair, and fragments of used supplements and cosmetic products are organized in a “before and after” format, where the difference lies not in the material itself, but in its staging. Harsh, unflattering light produces the “before” effect, while softer, more flattering light suggests “after,” as if the same object were passing through two optics, two regimes of looking. In this dramaturgy of perception, the gaze becomes active and produces the difference it wants to see, revealing how perception itself is the result of a carefully tuned gaze.

The installation examines how the gaze is shaped through the viewer’s relation to (their own) reflection. The seriality of “before and after” and the lighting conditions steer the gaze, revealing the mechanisms of the wellness and beauty industry – retouching, image-crafting, and perceptual correction – showing that the feeling of change arises more from the mode of looking than from any actual effect. Hair, nails, and silicone – materials at once intimate and artificial – become mediators of perception and surfaces for projection, in constant dialogue with the viewer.

In the video installation krmelj, šljokica, piksel (crust, glitter, pixel), nominis continues to explore light, dispersion, reflection, and fluidity. As a direct continuation of the eponymous performance, the artist transitions from the body in space to a two-dimensional image in which she herself becomes a cluster of pixels and a product of light. For nominis, light not only reveals form, but transforms it through the act of looking. In the video projection, the artist discloses her gaze through flashes of light with which she looks for and inscribes meanings into the materials that surround her and of which she is made. Such transfigured materials make up the drag ritual – not only in performance, but in the very process of construction and transformation.

The video is accompanied by an audio track in which nominis reads her own texts, prompting us to tease apart our view on drag and the body that performs it. The transformation of materials and the physical properties of light produce mirages, glitches, and illusions that are fleeting and elusive, while the ritual magic of drag is inseparable from the material, politicized, and gendered body. The uneasy, self-voyeuristic gaze that nominis lends to viewers reveals a face thick with makeup, crusty eyes, a corset biting into the skin, a razor cut, and a trickle of blood.

The artist also lip-syncs to her own voice, reading a text she authored, thereby further divorcing the notions of authorship and identity from the idea of the original. She is constructed and transformed through bodily, visual, and sound technologies, and through the gaze that fixes on neither the original nor the outcome. The result of this transformation is a kind of radical drag: an ongoing experiment, the repetition of ritual, and the search for meaning.

Following her earlier investigations into human impact on the natural environment and the constraints of natural givens such as the physical properties of materials and manifest forms of matter, Lucija Ostrogović in razbit ću ju nježno (I’ll break her gently) enters an interior space organized around a massive, irregular rock hidden behind a door and a curtain. The owner of this dwelling, whose everyday life we loosely follow, lives in constant adaptation to the rock, devising fascinating ways to at least partially restrain and tame it, and even to harness the potential of its form for simple, everyday needs.

Interweaving photographs and text, the work reconstructs these spatial relations in the gallery context – partly literally, and partly in the mind of the viewer. Continually seeking a narrative thread, the viewer also immerses herself in relations between soft and hard, smooth and rough, liquid and solid, cold and warm, and wet and dry. Training the gaze anthropomorphizes the rock, which is initially read as merely a bizarre impediment to the organization of domestic space. This play with ways of seeing and understanding things, especially the position of people in relation to given natural elements, rests as much on observing with the eye as on a particular narrative perspective and linguistic choices.

In all three exhibited works, the gaze is continually calibrated – by light, material, space, or the viewer’s intention. The artists show how meaning is constantly shifting and produced by the very act of looking, which fills the space of change through ceaseless tuning.

Lara Ana Kulenović (Zagreb, 2000) is a multimedia artist living and working in Zagreb. Her practice relies on expressing personal emotional experiences through their physical manifestation in objects and installations. The materials she uses are closely tied to each work’s concept, if not integral to it. She has had three solo shows and has participated in several group exhibitions in Croatia.

nominis is completing a graduate program in New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 2024, she participated in the WHW Akademija. Her work spans 3D animation, new media, visual art, writing, and performance. Within her practice, she develops a drag alter ego “nominis” and explores its materialization across objects and digital space through video, performance, installation, and drag. She has exhibited in Zagreb, Vienna, Ljubljana, and Split.

Lucija Ostrogović (Vrbnik, 1996) combines visual art and anthropology, focusing on their points of overlap and contact. Her methodological and research process is based on an ethnographic approach to everyday life. Through her works, she examines perceptions and relationships among landscape, space, and community using mapping and subtle spatial interventions.

Iva Jurić (Zagreb, 1989) has a background in language: she works as a translator and editor, and sees her curatorial practice as an extension of her work as a translator – an act of mediation that articulates, conveys, and opens artistic ideas to new meanings. Over the past two years, she has written introductory texts for several exhibitions by emerging artists. Together with Željko Beljan, she co-authored the artist’s book Kao pravi futbaleri (GMK, 2025).

Lucija Furač (Zagreb, 1996) holds a degree in art history and comparative literature. She works in criticism and investigative journalism in the fields of the visual arts, literature, and culture more broadly, as well as in publishing and marketing. She curates film programs in Croatia dedicated to emerging filmmakers from the South Caucasus, with a regional focus that also includes Southeast and Eastern Europe.

Toni Zadravec (Čakovec, 1993) holds a degree in art history and English language and literature. He works in the field of language and occasionally as a freelance illustrator. During his studies, as part of the Art History Students’ Club, he was part of the curatorial collective that organized the group exhibition Crno kroz prizmu at the Oris House of Architecture.

The exhibition Tuning the Gaze is the result of NOVAci, a project developed in collaboration between WHW and Pogon – the Zagreb Center for Independent Culture and Youth. The program is based on an open call and is being carried out for the fifth time this year. It is designed to provide early-career curators with the infrastructural, organizational, and mentoring support to realize their first solo curatorial projects. NOVAci functions as a support platform for developing knowledge in the field of contemporary art, with a focus on practical experience in curatorial practice – something that is largely absent from formal studies. As part of the project, curators Ana Kovačić and Lea Vene mentored three curators over several months: from developing the concept and meeting with artists to selecting works, designing the exhibition, and reporting on the project.

The program is supported by:
City of Zagreb – City Office for Culture and Civil Society
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Kultura Nova Foundation