Rijeka, 24 January 2020
PRESS RELEASE
First Major ECoC Exhibition to Open
“With the Collection” exhibition by visual artist David Maljković in the Rijeka Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
On Friday, 31 January, at 8 p.m., one day before the official opening ceremony of Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art will be host to the opening of the first major ECoC exhibition – “With the Collection” by artist David Maljković.
“With the Collection” is an open exhibition format, based on a series of collaborations during several time periods and in several locations. The exhibition’s core is represented by the artist’s distinctive site-specific intervention. In an atypical way, it represents the Museum’s collection, which, since its establishment in 1948, has never been represented by a permanent exhibition, primarily due to limited space. To this day, the Museum does not have a permanent exhibition of its collection. With the artist’s spatial reconfiguration, the Museum’s collection will become more present, and the works from the collection themselves will become more than just ordinary artefacts – they will gain new meaning, a new contemporaneity and social relevance.
In addition to exhibiting the Museum’s collection, the artist will share his interaction with the collection, with three artists of the younger generation.
Dora Budor will perform an intervention on the façade of the Museum’s building, titled “There’s something terrible about reality and I do not know what it is. No one will tell me”, as a continuation of the work she performed as part of the Casa Tomada exhibition in Mexico City in 2018.
With his work, “Museum of the Crystal Skull”, Niko Mihaljević, prompted by the phenomenon of the mythomaniac pop-cultural exploitation of Aztec crystal skulls, explores the transition of mythological narratives into popular culture, and of the digital turn into museumlikeness.
In late March of 2020, Amsterdam-based visual artist Nora Turato will interpret, with her distinctive work, the phenomenon of the private collection, through the Ivana Brlić Mažuranić collection in Villa Ružić, in collaboration with Theodoro Canziani, the custodian of the collection.
During a dynamic three months, various social spaces will be established and operating in the Museum’s exhibition area. This will be made clear by the very opening of the exhibition, since it will be accompanied by the community internet radio station, Radio Roža, a temporary “tenant” of the museum in the coming months. The opening’s music programme will be curated by TIPSY, and during the exhibition’s run, a pop-up bar will be led by Damir Čargonja Čarli.
In late February, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art will host a dinner with Klas Grdić, Igor Rukavina, Žarko Violić, Branko Cerovac, and Damir Čargonja Čarli, members of the Rijeka art scene, who were instrumental in Maljković’s artistic formation during the 1990s in Rijeka.
Another integral part of the exhibition is the collaboration with the Dutch Graphic Design and Visual Communications postgraduate studies programme, Werkplaats Typografie – WT, whose students designed the exhibition’s visual identity. In late March, they will participate in a workshop in Rijeka that will bring together students from the WHW Academy and a number of graduates and students from the Rijeka Academy of Applied Arts, under the mentorship of Petra Mrša. Their works, inspired by the Museum’s collection, will also become an integral part of the “With the Collection” exhibition.
David Maljković was born in Rijeka in 1973. He lives and works in Zagreb. His more recent solo exhibitions have been shown in The Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven, and the Secession in Vienna. He exhibited at the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the 56th Venice Biennale, the 29th Sao Paolo Biennale, the 11th and 9th Istanbul Biennale, and his works have been included in numerous collections around the world, including the G. Pompidou Centre in Paris, the MUMOK in Vienna, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the MoMA in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Collection in London.
The exhibition’s curator is Ivana Meštrov. The exhibition assistant is Katerina Jovanović.
The exhibition will remain open until 20 April 2020.