The Zagreb Salon is one of the longest-running group exhibitions in Croatia, dedicated to presenting current trends in the visual arts.
It was launched in 1965 at the initiative of the Association of Fine Artists of Croatia and was established by the Zagreb City Assembly. From its inception, the Salon has offered an overview of recent production across a wide range of fields—from painting, graphics, photography, and sculpture, to architecture, urbanism, applied arts, and industrial design.
Since 1976, the Salon has been held on a triennial basis, alternating between different artistic disciplines: visual arts, applied arts and design, and architecture. The organization is rotated among three professional associations: the Croatian Association of Applied Arts Artists (ULUPUH), the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), and the Association of Croatian Architects (UHA).
The 60 Zagreb Salon of Visual Arts:
Choreography for the Finish Line
From the atomic bomb, through the sixth mass extinction, to global warming – in a constant state of crisis, we mitigate, avoid and optimize existential risk. This social regime is reflected in our everyday lives: our private and professional life exposed to a constant balancing of roles and profits – with digital technologies only intensifying this. The general algorithmization has reduced the world to abstract zeros and ones – everything becomes part of the network, every experience is part of the digitally mediated flow of reality. In doing so, we are talking about technologies that replicate the structures of the game: from the practices of collecting titles, badges and points in a corporate context to calibrating emotional states through social networks and mobile applications. The experience of the world has been transformed into the mechanism of a game that becomes an end in itself, which requires an increasing stake of emotions, time and attention.
Today, the game is one of the inevitable and elementary strategies of social control and oppression, and our success depends on how willing we are to surrender to it. Nothing exists outside the game, just as we cannot consider reality outside the flows of information and images that make it up. We are put in an awkward position: how to think about the game and risk as a critical strategy today and what does this imply? Can we open up a space for free play – an “act of playing” that has no goal, that implicates the observer without knowing exactly what he or she is getting into? Can we take risks without knowing what we get in return? Or, how can we think critically about these categories, how can we deconstruct or rearticulate them? Can we consciously engage in play with the goal of defeat?
The 60th Zagreb Salon therefore glides between risk and play, entering into a dialogue with the contemporary regime of uncertainties – uncertain desires, uncertain existences, uncertain futures. Choreography for the Finish Line presents artistic responses to these questions, which take on these invisible strategies or reveal new ones – practices that set in motion a training ground for ludic interventions that stratify the algorithmic society of risk.
Curatorial concept
KUĆĆA (Jurica Mlinrec, Klara Petrović, Luja Šimunović)
Participating artists & collectives
Oktogon (Nacionalni muzej moderne umjetnosti, Ilica 5): Andrej Beštak & Anja Leko, Valentina Butumović, Kristian Kožul, Maja Milutin Čule & Katy Pyle, Petra Mrša, Tea Stražičić, Silvio Vujičić, Mario Mu, Luka Mahmuljin Udovičić, Lea Vidaković.
Gallery SKD Prosvjeta (Preradovićeva ul. 21): Andrej Beštak & Anja Leko, Jiao Guo, Rebecca Merlić.
Public interventions, performances, discursive programme: Nina Kurtela, Andrej Beštak & Anja Leko, Nora Turato, Niko Mihaljević, Antonija Balić & Marijana Županić Benić, Grupa 10 autora, Ivica Malčić, Vladimir Novak, Karlo Štefanek, Iva Supić Janković, Hugo Baranger, Pavle Mijuca.