37th Split Art Salon – Splitski Salon – Contemporary Visual Arts Biennial
37th Split Salon: Friday, November 4 – December 2, 2011
Venue : Diocletian Palace, Split, Croatia
Preview: Friday, November 4, 2011 at 8 p.m.
Opening hours: Every day, 9 am to 8 pm – closed on Sundays
The central topic of this year’s Split Salon, a biennial event in contemporary art, is the querying of the exhibition as site of ones own exposure and as potential site for the articulation of the lie as legitimate means of gallery narration.
One of the interesting terms to which life is related is the lie. Provocative here is the fact of the semantic noise that is generated among the Croatian public by approximating two verbal forms: izlagati (to tell a lie) and izlagati se (to exhibit or expose oneself).
The platform of the 37th Split Salon takes its cue from this noise. All thematic possibilities are taken into account, all possible investigations of the paths of the ‘urban lie’, the negation or distortion of truth, or its manipulation; political, personal, familial and social impulses as well as querying of the actual means of art and the possibility it has of being manipulated. Nor are the very unstable positions and dangers of ones own exposure in the public domain of artistic appearance ignored in the meantime.
The lie can be understood as a provocation, as a legitimate means in the denunciation of all kinds of anomalies. But it can also be understood as space of freedom, a refuge, a deflection of too great exposure and openness. Individuals are becoming increasingly accessible to the environment, and ever less to themselves. Cell phones, Internet, Big Brother and other reality shows private life is too easily giving way or is being entirely lost and negated. And after all, at the moment when we so facilely brandish the term transparency, expanding it to the area of political discourse, as well as the field of contemporary art and exhibition practices, iz-laganje has an almost subversive undertone.
In the area of private life, an internal reflexion of general experiences that become personal is being sketched out, as well as the exposure of ones own specialness, which becomes part of the public realm. From the pith and marrow, the most covert desires, wishes and needs and traumas to the very borders of privacy, across which the individual approaches the other, a wide spectrum of connotations of rights and also responsibilities is revealed. Handling the private life goes on between two extremes – introversion and extroversion.
In sum, this biennial contemporary art event is interested in the question of how the paradigms of the lie and of private life edge into the discursive space of city and gallery, that is, how they are articulated through contemporary art practice.
The project takes for granted the presentation of all media of artistic expression.
Curators of the 37th Split Salon are Dalibor Prancevic and Barbara Vujanovic.
About Split Salon:
The Split Salon is an exhibition of contemporary art that has been held, in a somewhat uneven rhythm of annual and biennial events, since 1969.
For more than four decades the Salon has brought together the potentials of the art scene not only from the region but from the whole of the area of the Republic of Croatia, organised entirely by the Split Croatian Artists Association, puts before the public the achievements of recent work through all the known manners of expression in the fine arts. The contemporary Split Salon, which is biennial, follows in its subjects the turbulent state of our social vicissitudes. Through creative authorial commitment and art production the Salon enables fine artists to make reference to social reality and accordingly has become a place for the promotion of universal cultural reality.
By persisting with the project of the Split Salon, the Split Croatian Artists Association cultivates worthwhile humanist values, maintains a critical attitude towards market-oriented neoliberalism, raises the issue of the effective survival of the love of freedom and provides answers via uninhibited liberty of artistic expression mediated via concrete artefacts of high artistic value.
As well as the exhibition programme, the curatorial set-up in the gallery venues, the Salon also organises discussions on a given theme with respect for different viewpoints via public discourse. The Split Salon regularly penetrates into the tissue of the city with the performative action of some of the participants in the project, exploring the reactions of not only the targetaudience but also of the whole of the public. In this manner it will happen that casual passers-by become active participants in the Salon, not merely neutral consumers of the artistic fare.
37th Split Biennal is organised by:
HULU, Split (Croatian Association of Artists – Split)
Obala Hrvatskog narodnog preporoda 24,
21 000 Split, Hrvatska
http://www.hulu-split.hr/
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