My Sweet Little Lamb (Everything We See Could also Be Otherwise), various venues, Zagreb

What could it mean to think about an art collection and connect it to reality—its past, its present, and its future? How to understand a collection that proposes to also be a body of knowledge on a period and place in time—but that currently witnesses how “alternative realities” have entered politics and shift towards a post-factual era emotionalizing the masses? How can a response to the changing political conditions be formulated by working with an art collection?

Founded in 2004, the Kontakt Art Collection focuses on works from the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe with a strong emphasis on conceptual and performative aspects starting from the late 1960s, reflecting political and historical transformations from this part of Europe and the position of art against this backdrop. The politics of collecting includes the decision of not operating a museum, but placing works and chapters of the collection with related research questions into different contexts to unfold the works’ potential.

Starting early last year, the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (WHW) developed, together with Kathrin Rhomberg, the seven-month project titled “My sweet little lamb (Everything we see could also be otherwise)”. The phrase is borrowed from a work by Mladen Stilinović, who passed away in July of last year and to whom the project is dedicated. It investigates different modes of exhibiting works in the collection, and the project unfolds in different forms of collaboration and in various places, such as artists’ studios, non-profit galleries, independent initiatives, private apartments, smaller institutions, or off-spaces throughout the centre of Zagreb, but also public space. The Gallery Nova run by WHW and the rented private Apartment Softić are the nodal points of the project, which unfolds in six episodes. Similar to a TV series, an episode has a subject, a time frame, and feeds into the next, and the first prepares the ground for the overall project by presenting the main protagonists and sketching out the subjects. Artists from Zagreb, such as Tomislav Gotovac, Sanja Iveković, and Goran Trbuljak, and from areas beyond, such as Geta Brătescu, Július Koller, Katalin Ladik, Goran Petercol, and (Ashley) Hans Scheirl, have been presented throughout the episodes on several occasions. These artists are put into dialogue with other artists not in the collection like Halil Altındere, Chto Delat, Gülsün Karamustafa, and Rabih Mroué, as well as an impressive number of artists rooted in the cultural and artistic context of Zagreb, including those whose work has not (yet) circulated widely.

In the first episode at the Apartment Softić, very dense situations were laid out: for example, an amorphous sculpture from Ivan Kožarić’s complex “Shape of Space” (1965), which he painted later in gold, was installed beside a photograph from Běla Kolářová’s “Hair cycle” (1964) that hung next to Mladen Stilinović’s “Deaf Pain” (1993), a white sheet of paper with the letters “Gluha bol” written in white cotton wool. Kožarić and Kolářová are two outstanding artists from the same generation who were living in socialist countries, working on different forms of renewal of art next to Mladen Stilinović’s work from his complex on pain. The Czech artist Běla Kolářová, who worked mainly in the medium of photography, belongs to the generation which touched off an iconoclastic revolution and entered the scene with a program of objective tendencies. Ivan Kožarić, also part of the collective Gorgona (1959–66), is one of the central artistic figures in the post-war avant-garde movement of former Yugoslavia, explicitly addressing the boundaries of traditional art forms.

During times of socialism, questions of power and the lack of power have been important, and Mladen Stilinović—whose impact on the cultural landscape of Zagreb cannot be overrated— stated that “This lack of power is a constant pain” and his colour for pain was white.¹ This cycle started with a dice, also including the act of burying pain and his “Dictionary – Pain” (2000–03). In contrast to American conceptualism, where the artists did step back from the work, this was a kind of “personal conceptualism”, putting the works much closer to life. Also, the use of Stilinović’s private spaces for exhibitions comes in here, apart from pointedly critiquing the traditional functioning of art economies, since he showed work in his private apartment from 2003 onwards (and the so-called “apt-art” does not have a tradition in Zagreb as it has in Moscow). Moreover, also in the first episode Sanja Iveković opened her studio—which needs to be read as an act of opposition towards the local cultural politics and institutions—for the presentation of “Private Documents: Show or Not to Show” and installed a broad scope of materials out of her archive, related to her artistic and activist practice.

The work by Tomislav Gotovac, who became known for exploring his naked body in public space, and whose Institute is placed in a private apartment, where the artist spent his last years, was set in relation to Ewa Partum’s series “Self-identification” (1980), where she collaged her privately taken nude photographs in photographs of Warsaw’s urban scene. In the Institute, the politics of the body in authoritarian regimes has been further explored with works by VALIE EXPORT and Nikolay Oleynikov. Such a dense, complex interweaving of practices, also manifesting in the format of exhibiting, has sketched out the terrain for the subsequent episodes and paved the way for solo presentations of works by Josef Dabernig, Friedl Kubelka, and Goran Trbuljak.

In the fifth episode, a series of conversations and performances negotiated the question “What comes after collecting?” The Institute of Contemporary Art hosted a show with Kazimir Malevich’s work “The Last Futurist Exhibition” (1985)—an installation of copies restaging this famous 1915 exhibition. In response, the performing character of Nicolaj Punjin gave a lecture performance, tracing historical moments of the original installation’s reception in Western Europe and the US—which became canonical through a single black-and-white photograph. The historical building up of the predominant art history with its geopolitical paradigm of the West was called into question by this setting. In a conversation with Kate Fowle (chief curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow), unfolding Garage’s politics of collecting artists’ archives, she laid out possible tools towards a correction of the grand narrative of art history. Questions of collecting performance art beyond documentation or collectibles, its presentations and preservations, have been brought up by a comissioned performance and the subsequent talk by Manuel Pelmuș in response to the collection.

“A sweet little lamb” has reflected on how the collection operates. This goes far beyond sharing the collection exclusively as a precious element to gain recognition—it has revealed that it triggers something, that it can be deconstructed and expanded, that it can be shared in solidarity, extends geographies, and is to be understood as a moveable entity.