GMK, Space 8ica, Šubićeva 29
Opening: May 7, 2025, at 7:00 PM
On view until May 14
Free admission
TANTRANTULE by Rada Iva Sibila is not a space we enter, but a state that enters us. It is an invisible crack between the everyday and the subconscious, a fragment of home that no longer offers comfort, but instead reflects our own disintegration. Sibila invites us into a room that was once whole, now surviving only as a rupture, a flickering fragment, a fading echo of what used to be. The gallery becomes a scenographic shell for a fragile, intimate, and unsettling experience that resists clear understanding. Through subtle spatial gestures, we are guided through fractures in memory, toward a confrontation with what space can no longer hold, yet cannot completely release.
Conceived as a simulacrum of domestic space, TANTRANTULE quickly reveals how the boundary between sensation and imagination has already shattered. The familiar quivers on the brink of collapse, and what was meant to remain hidden now insists on being seen. As visitors, we do not simply enter a skewed representation of a bathroom, but sink into a space between tenderness and panic. The body, confronted with spatial rupture, loses its grounding and yields to the rhythm of fragile materials and unspoken memories.
Pastel green and pink walls, a black-and-white tile pattern, wet marks on ceramic surfaces… these elements, though drawn from the artist’s personal archive, are stripped of their original function. Instead of supporting the room as a site of hygiene and bodily maintenance, they dismantle it and disperse its logic. Sibila treats all objects as active presences. They are not decorative, nor merely scenographic, but vulnerable beings, systems of presence that attempt to endure, despite the breakdown of their internal structure. Architecture no longer offers refuge, as everything takes place at the edge, between subjective perception and collective sleeplessness.
The idea of space as an extension of the body, as explored by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, is reversed here. Space no longer protects, it records every fractured moment of perception. The atmosphere recalls a specific kind of loneliness, where space becomes rhythm and duration. Like in Chantal Akerman’s work, where the hallway becomes a trap rather than a transition, or in Sophie Calle’s, where the private is never fully private but instead becomes a field for reading, inscribing, and exposure.
The exhibition is the result of a two-month research and production process, developed within the mentored residency program Zajednički, organized by Galerija Miroslav Kraljević. The program is designed to support the sustained work and reflection of emerging artists, creating conditions for more complex spatial and thematic interventions, which TANTRANTULE fully embraces. The mentorship was led by Sandra Sterle.
TANTRANTULE does not reconstruct trauma, it maps its terrain. Freud’s unheimlich and Mark Fisher’s weird and eerieare not just concepts, but the very substance of the space, the atmosphere we inhale while standing inside the installation. Every color and object Sibila places becomes a sensory threshold, an interrupted sentence that the viewer’s body must complete. Much like the cast negative spaces in Rachel Whiteread’s work, what we encounter here is not presence, but a trace of what has disappeared.
The title TANTRANTULE plays on layered meanings — tantrum, tantra, tarantula — embedding rhythm, bodily impulse, and spasm into the subconscious. Discomfort and ecstasy exist in the same breath. Vibrations shift between pain and gentleness, panic and recognition. As in the works of Pipilotti Rist, the feminized visual language here does not soothe, it unsettles. Pink and mint are not signs of softness, but tension, masks that conceal rupture. Like the artist’s blurred face in the promotional photographs, where she sits in a corner holding her hair as a final sign of autonomy. That gesture is deliberate. Hair, in its physical and symbolic weight, evokes strength, instinct, and the border between control and loss.
Rada Iva Sibila is building an artistic practice that does not seek the safety of form or the clarity of fixed meaning. Rather than offering stable constructions, she explores cracks; the relationships between body and space, consciousness and the unconscious, intimacy and the forces that continue to shape us, even when repressed. Her approach quietly carries a feminist critique of space, along with a longing to touch the esoteric and the subconscious, the structures that escape both language and image.
Sibila does not create a space for bodily care, she creates a space for confrontation. A place to recognize what has gone unsaid. A space for panic that can no longer be mistaken for silence.
We invite you to step into this fractured spatial composition, and in its silences, rhythms, and voids, find your own echo.
Tea Matanović
Rada Iva Sibila (born 2002, Zagreb) graduated from the School of Applied Arts and Design in 2021 and enrolled that same year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Animated Film and New Media. She completed her undergraduate studies in 2024 and is currently a first-year graduate student. Her artistic interests are primarily focused on contemporary visual and intermedia practices, with a particular fascination for approaches through feminist critique and esoteric/subconscious practices. One of her key areas of interest is corporeality—exploring the body and its physical and social conditioning.
She has exhibited her work at the Semester and Final Exhibitions of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (2021, 2022, 2024), in group exhibitions such as ALU Perspektiva at HDLU Zagreb (2024), Space in Transition at Putolovac Gallery in Zagreb (2024), and ALU/MET, also at Putolovac Gallery the same year. She exhibited at Rupa Gallery (2024), participated in a project culminating in an exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum titled Intimate Spaces of the Everyday(2024) in Zagreb, and at the PlesAdu festival that same year. She also held a solo exhibition in Dublin at Pallas/Project Studio (2024) and presented her work at the ZEZ Festival in Zagreb (2024). In 2023, she received the Rector’s Award for the opera project Amphitryon at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Artist: Rada Iva Sibila
Exhibition title: TANTRANTULE
Program: Mentored Residency Zajednički
Mentor: Sandra Sterle
Preface: Tea Matanović
Curatorial and Production Team: Antonela Solenički, Tea Matanović, Marlen Ban
Technical Support: Klara Šoštarić
Official Visuals Design: Luka Nera Sibila
Photo Documentation and Additional Support: Toni Kukuljica
Special Thanks: Katja Puškarić, Marta Milimović, Paula Kovačić, Karlo Mikulaco
The Zajednički residency is funded by the City of Zagreb’s Special Public Call for programs involving young artists, along with support from the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia. The work of GMK is supported by Kultura Nova Foundation and INA, d.d.
