Friday, 4 September 2026 at 7 pm
On Friday, 4 September at 7 pm, the exhibition People of Zagreb, Check if You're Alive by Vlasta Delimar will open at the Forum Gallery, 16 Tesla Street. The exhibition is curated by Katerina Jovanović and Sabina Oroshi.
As Vlasta Delimar celebrates her 70th birthday this year, her oeuvre reopens in the present, with a view towards the ways in which its meaning changes over time. The Check if You're Alive project is conceived as a multi-venue anti-retrospective which, instead of a linear overview of almost fifty years of artistic practice, connects works from different periods and observes what happens when they encounter a new space, time, and audience. After its first episode at Rijeka's Kortil Gallery, the project continues at Zagreb's Forum Gallery with the exhibition People of Zagreb, Check if You're Alive.
In Delimar’s work, time is never merely a chronology. Works created in the early 1980s are not confined to the time of their creation; instead, their meaning changes each time we look at them again. In Zagreb, works created over almost fifty years come together, raising the question of what happens to the body, desire and visibility when our age, social context and the way the community views the body all change.
The body is at the centre of the Zagreb edition, understood as a space of experience, resistance and negotiation. What Delimar opened up in the early 1980s through sexuality, autonomy and the right to self-representation continues today through questions of ageing, visibility and the right to desire. Photographs Cock I Love (1980) and Fuck Me (1981), for example, in dialogue with the recent work Wanna Fuck, Get in Line (2026), reveal a continuity of artistic position: a refusal to pre-determine what the body may be, how it may look, and when it may be seen.
The Zagreb exhibition, in turn, specifically raises the question of ageing and the visibility of the female body. In the performance Successful Ageing at the opening of the exhibition, Delimar speaks about her own body, sexuality, medicine, physical functionality and the changes that time brings - combining humour, eroticism and the experience of everyday life. In the work Towards the Dignity of Ageing (2026), this question moves from the gallery space into the public sphere: an older female body appears on billboards, within the visual language of advertising, traditionally so geared towards youth, desirability and consumption.
The Zagreb exhibition simultaneously connects personal experience with history, memory and spaces that carry their own layers of memory. The works The Silence of Living Sculptures in the Silence of Damaged Houses (2021), Danica (2023) and This Was I in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died (1980) show how collective history can be read through the individual body and autobiographical experience. The past, in this way, remains present in the space, in memory, and in the way we perceive the world today.
The title People of Zagreb, Check if You're Alive is also an invitation to the audience. Aliveness here is measured by the willingness to look at what might unsettle us, pique our interest or force us to see our own views differently. In encountering Delimar's works, one ultimately tests not only how alive the art is, but also how alive our own perspective is.
The exhibition can be viewed until 26 September 2026. After Zagreb, it will travel to Split’s Galić Salon in October and to Ljubljana’s Photon Gallery in November.
