The Cultural and Information Center (KIC) announces the decision of the Advisory Board on the selection of projects for the 2027 exhibition programme of The Forum Gallery and The Upper Floor Gallery.
We thank all the artists and curators who responded to KIC's public call and submitted their proposals, honouring us with their trust. The large number of high-quality applications (one hundred in total) confirmed the diversity and vitality of the contemporary art scene. Many of the projects that were not selected are extremely valuable, but time and space constraints forced the Advisory Board to leave them off the shortlist.
Advisory Board
Tanja Dabo, Tihomir Milovac, Ivana Meštrov, Tonka Sušec and Feđa Gavrilović.
THE FORUM GALLERY – Selected Projects
Branko Franceschi — Julije Knifer: Meander in Public Space
The project is based on Knifer's idea of transforming a pedestrian crossing into a meander, which was realised in 1986 in Subotica after an initial attempt to realise it in Zagreb was unsuccessful. The exhibition contextualises this intervention with photographs and works from the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, while the idea of the meander will be re-enacted in the public space with the participation of Duje Jurić and Luka Kušević.
For an Outstanding Contribution to Croatian Culture
This group exhibition critically examines the socio-economic position of self-employed artists in Croatia, the relationship between artistic value and market success, and the consequences of long-term precarious work. Through documents, personal archives, video, photography, performance and other media, the project raises the question of how institutions and society materially value artistic labour.
Curator: Davorka Perić
Read Martek
The project dedicated to Vlado Martek connects his pre-poetry, samizdats, acts of agitation and the relationship between word and image with participatory and street actions. The exhibition moves out of the gallery space onto Preradovićeva Street and the library network, transforming reading and text into a public, social and communal artistic practice.
Curator: Davorka Perić.
Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo — A Group Exhibition of Contemporary Estonian Art
In collaboration with the Estonian Academy of Arts, the project presents a selection of contemporary Estonian art and practices that connect digital media, installation, found objects and institutional critique. A special emphasis is placed on the experience of living in a highly digitized society, the relationship between technology and the human, and questions of identity, surveillance and value.
Stephanie Peršić / Igor Eškinja — Inscribed Images
Drawing on Eškinja’s long-standing interest in the spatiality and dimensionality of the image, the project brings together works on plasterboard, filler, and interventions carried out directly in the gallery space. The boundaries between the finished and the unfinished, the material and the artistic, and the image and architecture become the main field of research.
Iva Kovač — What Remains
This group exhibition is based on imagining life after social, ecological and political upheavals. Through the themes of home, kinship, labour, security, recovery and the future, the project brings together research-based and participatory artistic practices that do not depict the catastrophe itself, but rather what remains after it and the ways in which a different collective life can be built from the remnants.
Ivana Keser — Solvitur Ambulando / Resolved by Walking
The photo-essay arises from a long-term, almost diary-like practice of walking on Mount Medvednica and recording the landscape through the changing seasons. The repetition of routes, places of solitude and meditation, and the gradual disappearance of the forest turn the photograph into a record of changes in nature, but also of changes in the observer.
Jelena Blagović — Expectations
The project explores parental waiting in organised children's activity spaces as a specific form of time investment and everyday life. Through photographic observation of car parks, corridors, stands, cafés and other transitional spaces, it raises questions of expectation, attention, availability and the social distribution of time.
Ksenija Orelj — Set Sail Without a Raincoat. Through a Land of Unconfirmed Phenomena
The project brings together artworks that create alternative ways of orientating oneself in the world without reliable maps: archives, notes, classifications, collages and imaginary cartographies. Inspired by the reflections of Ursula K. Le Guin, the installation treats uncertainty as a space for imagination, trust and the creation of new relationships, rather than as a reason to shut down in fear.
Liam Ryan — HOME BREEDING: A LESSON FOR THE FIRST GRADE / Umbra Docet Vol. II
Ryan's project connects painting, historical documents and political iconography to question the ways in which historical responsibility is hidden, mitigated, or made socially acceptable again. Large black-and-white paintings function as unstable fields of evidence, open to reading, overwriting, editing, and intervention by the public.
Siniša Labrović — The Exhibition
Labrović develops a series of installations, video works and participatory situations that question power, institutions, the balance and boundaries between art and everyday life, through irony, absurdity and physical performance. The exhibition includes works that activate the audience, and the opening is also conceived as a performative event.
THE UPPER FLOOR GALLERY – Selected Projects
Martina Jezidžić — Infantia (disturbia)
The project brings together works in various media dedicated to emotional vulnerability, inner tension and the earliest forms of human experience. The motif of the crying baby appears as an image of emotion before language and social roles, and as a symbol of the need to be seen, recognised and accepted.
Neva Lukić and Ivona Fregl — As if I am tired and as if I am old, as if it is boring and too much for me to know
This group exhibition does not view ageing as a loss of value, but as an accumulation of experience, memory and cultural heritage. The project simultaneously connects the ageing of artists and institutions, questioning how longevity, slowness and continuity can counter the market logic of constant novelty, productivity and replacement.
Tajana Dedić-Starović Ostić — Soft Tissue
This performative project explores the everyday and often invisible rituals of female self-discipline in the name of beauty, acceptance and desirability. Through the body, beauty aids, video and photography, the project examines the boundary between self-care and self-violence, and the relationship between intimate experience and the consumerist system that produces ideals of the “enhanced” body.
Zoe Šarlija — Lost in Amsterdam – Reading the City
The photographic series views Amsterdam as a city shaped by gentrification, the commodification of space and an economy of desire. Through double exposures, the author builds a layered, unstable image of a city in which public space is transformed into a backdrop for consumption, and the search for experience and happiness becomes part of the market.
Domagoj Burilović — Neudorf
Through photography, the project explores the history of settlements in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia, which were established by the migration of various Central European communities, and the gradual disappearance of their architecture and population. Photographs of vanished houses are digitally returned to the sites of their own ruins, connecting migration, war, demographic collapse and the memory of a former space of coexistence.
Josip Pino Ivančić — i.j. piNO
The project is conceived as a concise retrospective of the long-standing artistic practice of Josip Pino Ivančić, one of the most recognizable figures on the alternative and conceptual scene. A spatial, three-part video installation and a selection of films connect his interest in performance, social sculpture, labour, and the position of the individual within social systems.
We thank and congratulate all participants once again, and invite the selected artists and curators to collaborate with us on the realisation of their projects in the coming calendar year.