a new exhibition
Venue: 10ka space, GMK, Šubićeva 29
Opening: Thursday, June 26, 2025, at 7:00 PM
Duration: June 26 – July 10, 2025
Gallery hours: Tue–Fri: 4–7 PM / Sat: 10 AM–1 PM
The exhibition Scholarship Agreement by Marina Brkić stems from an experience of spatial and temporal suspension: a period spent in Požega under the conditions of a scholarship. Through a series of subtle, personal, and carefully executed works, the artist does not explore the theme of return, but rather of being placed—without choice. Avoiding dramatization and sentimentality, the cycle poses the question of what remains when space becomes a condition and time becomes an obligation. Through textile, photography, sound, and documentation of the everyday, the exhibition articulates a state familiar to many—a state that is not chosen, yet one from which work emerges.
Foreword by Marta Radman:
“There are moments when artistic work is not born solely from an intrinsic need for expression, but from circumstances that cannot be avoided. When you do not choose the place, nor the time, nor the theme, you simply have to adapt. Scholarship Agreement arises precisely from such a position. The title of the exhibition leaves little room for romanticization. Scholarship Agreement sounds like a document, a bureaucratic fact, a form that determines the course and time of someone else’s life. Six months in Požega, bound by scholarship rules, were not a return, nor an escape, nor a beginning for the artist. They were a suspension. And it is precisely from this suspension that these works arise: subtle, gentle, yet clear in their internal need to record a time that could not have been otherwise. This is not a return, not a reckoning, nor a sentimental gesture, but a quiet attempt to grasp space and time, even though they were not chosen, at least through work. Through the precise mapping of a condition familiar to all who have ever found themselves without a choice. In this necessity, there is no catharsis, but rather a series of subtle impulses that transform everyday life into a space of reflection. The cobweb may be the most direct sign of this duration: a crocheted structure growing along the wall, like inherited but unwanted tenderness. The reference to the grandmother is not sentimental, her crocheting, once a gesture of care, here becomes a sign of stasis. The artist crochets because she has time. She has patience and must wait.
In A Moment Later, two sets of photographs, archival and recreated, establish a fifty-year temporal gap between father and daughter. They pose for the same photographer, in the same place, with the same bodies, but with a shift in gaze. The artist does not reproduce the past, she speaks over it. The father’s childhood pose becomes a point from which she builds her own frame. The photographs are small, as is that which is being preserved, not grand history, but everyday presence. Outlook and Let the Water Take It are works in which we see almost nothing. Visual monotony, a window, the sky, the river, articulates exhaustion. The voice reading the contract is calm, but not soothing. The sound of water becomes noise we cannot silence. The window doesn’t offer a view, it is merely a place through which light and darkness enter.
In Calendar, days are not crossed out but drawn. A black miniature gives each day volume and texture. Transience is marked as a trace, not an absence, not to aestheticize time, but to survive it. In Childhood Friends, a plush teddy bear, one of the few objects the artist still owns, and a publication on Miroslav Kraljević, who spent part of his childhood in Požega, form an imagined encounter between personal memory and institution. The work is neither nostalgic nor representative, but a considered act of return that does not seek identification but opens the question of what remains when a place from the past reappears, not as memory, but as real space. This exhibition is not dramatization but a self-aware articulation of a state many will recognize, especially those at the beginning of their professional path, facing systemic limitations. It does not demand empathy, but gently evokes it. The artist does not use the language of critique, but her position clearly shows where institutions often fail: a young woman, recently graduated, with administrative debt and no freedom of movement.
There is no direct narrative here, no pathos, only reality. Everything is executed carefully, seriously, without excess. A window view that does not change. The sound of water that flows too loudly. A voice reading a contract. Calendars that do not mark days, but their absence. A teddy bear with no anecdote. These works ask for nothing, not even recognition. They simply remain, stable, quiet, present, within a concrete temporal framework. This cycle is not a document, not a confession, not a study. The exhibition does not offer comfort. There is no gesturing of pain, nor attempts to explain this reality. What arises does so from the discipline of maintenance. Work as a way to get through the day, to keep the body in the room, to allow thought to appear at all. This condition has no other place but in work. And that is not a weakness. That is the starting point. This is a working structure, spatial, temporal, affective, within which events are not interpreted, but stored. Not as an archive. As gesture. Surfaces are not filled with meaning. They are maintained. Each work functions as a system that does not represent, but endures. The question of belonging, to Požega, to family, to space, is unproductive here. Return is not a choice. Nor is resistance. The artist does not resist. She positions herself. In that precise remove lies the key to the entire cycle. And that is quite enough. Anything more would already be inaccurate.”
Marina Brkić was born in 1985 in Požega. Before pursuing formal art education, she was involved in theatre acting and the creation of both contemporary and traditional jewellery. She graduated in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2023 with the distinction summa cum laude, where she is currently enrolled in postgraduate studies. She has held four solo exhibitions and participated in about twenty group shows. She is the author of several temporary interventions and two public sculptures. Together with colleagues Matea Despot and Leonardo Losciale, she co-founded and ran the independent student gallery Rupa in the ALU space at Jadran Film. She is interested in the possibilities offered by unusual working and living conditions, and in the overlapping of time and space. Her practice spans the expanded field of sculpture and photography.
Gallery Managers: Tea Matanović, Antonela Solenički
Gallery Artistic Council: Ana Kovačić, Lea Vene, Tihana Bertek, Tea Kantoci, Sonja Pregrad
Production: Generator for Multidisciplinary Co-Productions (GMK)
Exhibition title: Scholarship Agreement
Artist: Marina Brkić
Foreword by: Marta Radman
Photographer of A Moment Later: Kamilo Hržina
Photo documentation (exhibition and opening): Šimun Bućan
Acknowledgments: Udruga Bijeli val, Vedran Grladinović, Filip Sertić, Studio Depth The program is supported by the City of Zagreb.
GMK’s work is supported by Kultura nova Foundation and INA, d.d.
