Location: Gallery MKC - Youth Centre (Ulica Slobode 28)

Date: February 29 - March 21 2024, exhibition opening and performance at 7 pm


 
Slaven Tolj's exhibition in Split continues the exhibitions held last year in Bologna (Palazzo d'Acurssio), Rijeka (Gallery OK) and Zagreb (Institute for Contemporary Art), and on this occasion is supplemented with new works and artistic interventions. Exhibitions, just as with the artist's works, build on each other. Namely,‘today when he exhibits his earlier works or parts of them, Tolj does not treat them retrospectively but associatively. They are carefully chosen because they are directly related to some situations, phenomena, ideas and predictions that are haunting the artist or that he is currently living with’. According to the works, the artist seems to transpose his personal and complex poetics into the underground world. ‘Whether it is about people who are in his mind or things that he resurrects with archaeological methods, or life circumstances and situations, we will notice that death, being worn out, spent - everything that has been brought to an end, is in a permanent associative connection with his everyday life’ (quote from Helena Puhara’s text).

Slaven Tolj (born 1964) articulates his work in several fields of art, including performance, actions, ambient and site-specific installations and objects. He uses real space, and encountered and found objects, incorporating time into his work and using his own body. His art mainly deals with social themes, themes of identity, the past, human vulnerability, loneliness and death. He has exhibited in numerous individual and group exhibitions around the country and abroad. Besides his work in art, he is known to the public as an exhibition curator, co-founder of the Art Workshop Lazareti in Dubrovnik and Institute of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatian selector of the Venice Biennale of Fine Arts in 2005 and former director of MMSU Rijeka.