My work has been selected for the 46th Zagreb salon. Zagreb saloon is a representative annual exhibition of contemporary art of the Republic of Croatia, established by the Zagreb City Council in 1965. The theme of this year exhibition was “Handwriting of the New Age”.
“In the last decade, the topic of manuscription, adopted from the world of mechanic and digital replicas, imposed itself in a number of texts. Apart from the famous writers of the French school, highlighted by the lyric writing of Jacques Derrida, and in a time when digital reproduction stripped the last artistic trace in the mechanics, this topic was used by the writers of new media from a less fatal angle, such as Mark Dery. In the past few years, the mechanic and digital visual space ‘contaminates’ individual messages, which even when not directed at a specific reader like letters in the past, suggest a subjective, even auto-reflexive aura in the sense of inability that the same message be reproduced and therefore become as all the other – general. In the handwritings we witness our own past, childhood, fledgling difficulties, and also various critiques from the times when our memories are left locked. Nevertheless, our every single desire to write something on a blank page will irrefutably bring us back to the beginnings of a shaky hand without any calligraphy practice, scribbling something on a wall of a cave. From that first step, the first letter of the alphabet which was not ‘A’, up until today, the names engraved on gold signet rings, sawn on handkerchiefs and blouses, made into seals, written on paper, imprinted in photographs, posters, carved in trees, written on white walls even tattooed on some bodies, mark the area of applied arts. When you multiply your own signature – art ceases to exist and mass society is created, and the name becomes a brand. Therefore, on the boundary of art and repetition inherent to applied arts, I would like to ask you – What is and where handwriting today?”
― Ana Peraica, Ph.D.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalog
My good friend Daniel Srdarev with hiss brilliant works.
