06/08 2021
Media Mediterranea 23 Festival – Day Two
”Staged authenticity” at the exhibition of guest authors
The 23rd Media Mediterranea Festival, organized by the Metamedij Association, continued its program on Friday, August 6, at the Pula Forum, where Hrvoje Hirschl’s exhibition “Collapse” opened in the Augustus Temple, and an exhibition of other guest authors opened at the European Center for Peace and Development.
Before the opening of the exhibitions, the director of the festival Marino Jurcan and the author of the curatorial concept and theme of the festival “Staged Authenticity”, Ivana Tkalčić, addressed the audience. Jurcan greeted those gathered and thanked the Archaeological Museum of Istria for providing space for the installation of Hrvoje Hiršl and gave the floor to curator Tkalčić. She explained that the topic refers not only to tourism, but also to the problems of the authentic and staged on social networks. Hirschl then took the floor and briefly described his work.
– What you will be able to see in the temple is the culmination of two years of research that began at the Max Planck Institute and finally ended at the Institute of Physics in Zagreb under the leadership of Dr. Neven Santic. The installation itself is on the one hand a work of art, and on the other hand a scientific instrument that would never be built because they would not need it. The topic itself is an increase in the double-gap experiment which shows that light particles – photons – behave differently when measured and completely different when not measured. Thus, the relation of wave and particle is the very theme of the project, and the experiment is the one that raises the question of the very nature of reality because it implies that reality behaves in a way when one observes it and is dependent on measurement and the conscious observer. The research is related to my many years of research on various structures and invisible phenomena that I try to visualize and relate to human experience, Hiršl said.
Before the opening of the exhibition of guest authors at the European Center for Peace and Development, curator Tkalčić explained how the gathered artists referred to the theme of the festival.
– In this space we can see Luana Lojić with the work “Bits of real: for development purposes only”, Tjaša Kalkan with the work “Poseidon’s Wrath”, Luka Kedžo with the work “Who Lives Here, Who Lives Here?”, Then Alex Brajković and the work ” Generative Contemplation ”and Lana Stojićević with the work“ Sunny Side ”, and Niko Mihaljević will hold a performance called“ Need Your Love So Bad ”after the introductory words. All these authors, together with Hrvoje Hiršl, are quality contemporary artists of the younger generation who have exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and around the world, and are accompanied by a number of international and domestic awards. The way we connected this year’s concept of the festival and the works of the authors is to show their way of reading the situation we are currently in because they offer a different view of the directions for the future, said Tkalčić.
After the performance, Niko Mihaljević explained what his work is based on: The sound performance of the blues evergreen “Need Your Love So Bad” popularized by Fleetwod Mac with its 1968 adaptation studies the relationship between the canons of conceptual art of the 1960s, such as Sol LeWitt’s way of thinking and pop music. The performance came spontaneously, during a residency in New York, when I came across a MIDI mat on YouTube that serves as a pad for guitarists to practice playing electric guitars and decided to do some sort of serial karaoke performance where the guitar is replaced by whistling. The performance consists of ten three-minute performances of the song, while the form itself is very serious as it refers to serial compositions of visual art. The content is quite drinkable and benign, resembling karaoke performances. You could say that work is more of a kind of benign boredom, in principle you are trapped in a loop that lasts half an hour and nothing happens too much, so some relationship between pleasure and discomfort is explored. The audience reacts differently, it is very hard for some, it is good for some, it depends on the situation “, said Mihaljević.
Ivana Tkalčić, the curator of this year’s festival, told us that the work was chosen, among other things, because of the interesting moment of the transition from one format to another. “The original blues song was transformed into a certain digital sound, but through Nick’s way of whistling, a new dimension was provided that was interesting for this festival in terms of authenticity. It is important to recognize a certain authenticity of the original work to which the author refers and to find new ways of looking at or realizing new directions for the future from some previous materials, ” said the curator.
Media Mediterranea Festival ends with this year’s program on Saturday, August 7 at 8.30 pm with a presentation and exhibition of speculative design works from the workshop “Augmented Authenticity”, with guest authors and Speculative Soundtrack signed by Branko Škara and Henry Marić in the gallery of the Society of Architects of Istria (Smareglina Street 1).
