BOOK PROMOTION
Zlatko Kopljar K19

January 31, 2014 at 6 pm.

Barrel Gallery
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb

HR

We invite you to join us on Friday, January 31, 2014 at the promotion of a book about Zlatko Kopljar’s installation K19, in Barrel Gallery, at 6 pm.
At the promotion will speak Žarko Paić, Ph.D.

The book brings essays by Žarko Paić, Ph.D. and Israeli Curator Ory Dessau and rich photographic documentation of Zlatko Kopljar’s installation.

In an essay written for new work of Zlatko Kopljar, K-19, Žarko Paić, in the context of Adorno, Badiou and Lyotard, ask a question: Can contemporary art provide a possibility for man’s redemptive reversal? How and when does it become legitimate to open the possibilities of facing the question of boundaries between the sublime and the evil if just turning history into a museum issue at the time of techno-science visualizes everything that took place as artifact and information in databases? The seal on the procedures of truth is put by a third party. The utterance does not include a naïve illusion about yielding the history to neutral historiographical science. It would make even less sense to expect that the event would be interpreted in the awareness of the contemporaries as self-evident and hence non-problematic, without opposite interpretations. Thus the seal is not put just by the time. The struggle for the truth of the time imprints it into the soft tissue of history. Direct and indirect heirs both of the executioners and their victims face it. In this schism between worlds the contemporary event art sets its works into public space to make a discourse on an emerging community at all possible. The art of setting artifacts into public space is by no means just an installation of traces and archiving memory against oblivion. This is about something much more authentic. Truth, bringing guilt to awareness, and forgiveness create some room for the freedom of the new beginning.
How do we face the boundary of sublimity and evil today, without making this challenge just a cheap political and ideological means for other purposes or a mere aesthetic effect of de-realization of irreducible ‘nature’ of that about which we might not be able to say anything more? A credible answer to this question is offered by contemporary artist Zlatko Kopljar in his project-installation K-19. This is also probably one of his most radical performances. The question of guilt is not anymore directed at someone outside of the territory of the long-gone power of the nation-state. It is decisively posed to the contemporaries.
K19 was produced with the support of Serb National Council, Jewish Community Zagreb, Roma Community, Jasenovac Memorial Site, Ministry of Culture of the Republic Croatia and City Office for Education, Culture and Sports (City of Zagreb).