Location: Museum of Fine Arts (Kralja Tomislava 15, 21000 Split)

Duration: October 11 - November 6, 2022

HRVOJE COKARIĆ

INVALID PROTOCOLS

international project GARDENING OF SOUL

Curator: Marija Stipišić Vuković

The Museum of Fine Arts’ collaboration with the Split artist Hrvoje Cokarić begins its participation in the multi-year project GARDENING OF SOUL that is conceived around an artistic interpretation of the garden and the gardening phenomenon understood in a broader social, economic, ecological and cultural context.

Ecology, space, community, context, new technologies are all characteristics we associate with the work of Hrvoje Cokarić. In recent years, he has shown an interest in the field of acoustic ecology and focuses his work on plants, that is, their ability to generate electrical signals depending on various environmental stimuli, which he turns into music using special equipment, computers and synthesizers. The Garden of Past and Future, a project initiated in 2015 by the then Museum director Branko Franceschi, which was coordinated and implemented by the Permaculture Association of Dalmatia, proved to be an ideal place for staging Cokarić’s latest work. Various Mediterranean plants (olive, strawberry tree, rosemary, agave, fig, laurel, oleander, bamboo) were planted in seventeen recycled containers set-up in the form of a cosmogram, based on the idea of Marko and Marika Pogačnik and Simona Čudovan, which combines the form of a mandorla as the feminine principle and two arrows as a symbol of the male principle, representing the energy seed, the embryo of the new space and future contents of the Museum of Fine Arts. In the Museum Garden, Cokarić focuses on the reaction of individual plants to poetry, and selects several texts that he reads to the chosen plants. The result is a new kind of soundscape that brings nature to life with literal organic variations of notes, rhythms and tone. Recording these signals in such a context produces beautiful sounds which can be described as “organic electronic music” that achieves spontaneous communication and a casual ambient, giving a completely new dimension to the Museum Garden.

After being staged at the Museum of Fine Arts, Hrvoje Cokarić’s ambiental audio visual installation will be presented in December of this year, in the large international exhibition at the Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem, the Czech Republic, as the leader of this international project.

More information is available at https://galum.hr/en/exhibitions/exibition/1757/.