Johannes Rauchenberger / 2009

Why Inferno and Paradise need a still life, a forest, a light bulb test station and a shining suit: notes on Zlatko Kopljar’s K12 and K13

How can competing conflict fields of contemporary understanding of the world – like micro- and macro-politics, localness and globalism, post-capitalism and post-socialism, materialist approach and metaphysical points of reference – develop an aesthetically uncompromising potential? The Croatian artist Zlatko Kopljar, whose work we can position at the intersection of visual art and performance, has since the 90s developed “constructions”¹ (“K”s) to achieve that aim. They “map”² his body into those tension zones with an immense demand for presence.

Read More “Dante Catches Light”

Krešimir Purgar / 2007

Zlatko Kopljar’s K9 Compassion from a perspective of the visual turn

The question posed by W.J.T. Mitchell certainly seems key for understanding contemporary cultural, artistic and media production, and in its simplest form it would read: has the moment of change to the basic paradigm which we use to explain the phenomena of the world that surrounds us really arrived, and can we finally say that a shift has occurred in our model of experiencing the world towards the doimination of the image with the abandonment of the predominance or logos? Mitehell developed his ideas about the pictorial turn¹, about turning towards visuality in contrast to earlier postulates made by Richard Rorty who claimed that the human sciences, as well as the critical reflection of modern societies about themselves, were structured through various forms of textuality and that the final act in this epistemological shift was in fact taking place through a linguistic turn”.

Read More “Iconology and ideology”

Miško Šuvaković / 2005

Rhetorical figures of the body by Zlatko Kopljar

Zlatko Kopljar’s works (performances, videos, photo-prints) were created in the 1990’s in a paradoxical confrontation between the current world’s micro- and macro-politics. Through the strategies and tactics of performance art, Kopljar problematized the relationship between the contemporary body and the contemporary world in the confrontation of the paradigmatic idealistic notions active-passive, aggressive-meditative, political-religious, materialistic-Christian, neoliberal-postsocialist, and local-global. His provocative mappings of the body/with the body comprise a wide span of presentations of bodily indexation ranging from behavioral expressiveness to rhetorical inexpressiveness. The symbolic knot of expressive lines of behavior and inexpressive positionings of the body presents a problem which he, as an artist responding to current events, places before the future and in relation to the past.

Read More “Mapping the body/with the body”

Branko Franceschi / 2004

The construction no. 9 is founded on the action that Kopljar conceived inspired by the residency in New York he had obtained with the Franklin Furnace program in 2003. Just like most contemporary artists, he perceived the residency in New York – with the purpose of creative work and the possibility of its presentation – as the chance of the lifetime.

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Sanja Cvetnić / 2002

Every year in the first week of May and on the 19th of September the eyes of Neapolitans are fixed upon a small transparent vesse. In the dramatic scenery of the cathedral, in the midst of improbable crowd of believers and curious observers, the priests bring out the monstrance containing the blood of St. Januarius [San Gennaro), the patron of the city. They bring if to the reliqucary containing saint’s bones. If the coagulated martyr’s blood becomes liquid in the vicinity of his bones, grateful cries burst throughout fhe cathedral: Miracle! Miracle! The suspense of expectation subsides into contrite piety, few witnesses usually faint or get into hysteric ecstasy, but the rest of them disperse satisfied because St. Januarius answered their prayers again, thusassuring his miraculousc protection over the city.

Read More “What is the price of artists blood?”