Branko Franceschi / 2009
The relation towards architecture as a representation of a system of values and collective thinking models or a spatial organization charged with symbolic messages, historical links, mythical, religious, and spiritual competences has become a commonplace of interest of contemporary visual artists during the last decade.
Sandra Križić Roban / 2009
The first frames of Kopljar’s new work intensively occupy the gaze of the viewer, they invite to persistent observation of details, to expectancy of something that might, but must not necessarily happen. The scenes are peaceful, the camera static, they show a forest by night. In the foreground are dark tree-trunks among which some crowns are visible as well. A late, strange light illuminates them from the distance. Rays reach the leaves laterally, like in a baroque scene, illuminating their uneven edges. Nothing moves except insects, and even they hover among the leaves in slow motion, dazzled by the light that seems to have surprised them.
After some time, from nowhere, through the forest comes the performer and the author of the video, Zlatko Kopljar, wearing a white suit that seems to have absorbed this unusual light. He reaches a sphere whose interior is illuminated. We remember it from his previous work, K 12, in which he was filmed in a bent down position while attempting to clasp the envelope that holds the light and the energy retained in its core.
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.
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”.
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.