During a two-months residency, in April and May 2006, the Finnish artist Minna Henriksson made two new works, which reflect her experiences of Zagreb and travels thoughout Croatia and that she has presented on a solo show at g-mk.
The work ‘Zagreb Notes’ is a wall drawing, consisting of a map of relations, which documents the way the artist perceived the local art scene and the way in which artists, organizations and institutions are interrelated on the local, national and regional level.
The artist wasn’t concerned with studying facts about the art scene and its relations but focused rather on gathering information from people she was meeting, as well as their reflections on what they thought was significant and actual at the time in the art scene, whether truthful, exaggerated or false, all resulting in a complex set of relations. Her complex and often provocative map gathers different protagonists, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, organizations within the Zagreb independent cultural scene, individuals to institutions in Vukovar, Rijeka, Split and Dubrovnik.
The work ‘Euro-shops’ is based on the observation that the desire for not belonging to the Balkans has turned into a desire to be part of Europe. The artist found this best illustrated in the public space of Zagreb, with various shops’ names containing references to Europe and the European Union. Later in the summer, travelling in other Southeast European cities (Ljubljana, Belgrade, Istanbul, and especially Skopje, and Pristina and Prizren in Kosovo), she noticed also the phenomenon of Euro-shops, concluding that, if there was a connection between the countries in the Southeast European region, it had changed its name from Balkan to Euro.
These two works are result of separate observations or researches but they are both indirectly related to the fact that the new collectivity of the Zagreb art scene, which is a flexible, interdisciplinary, civilized, attractive, and thus evidently a European model (as opposed to the old-fashioned and stiff model of the governmental institutions, which have not been able to transform themselves to the new demands of art production), can also be paralleled with the ideological trend that the public spaces manifest.
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Minna Henriksson was born in 1976 in Oulu in Finland. She finished graduate studies at the Multimedia department of Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and the postgraduate program of Critical Studies (Rooseum Centre and Lund University) at the Art Academy in Malmo, Sweden. She exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Helsinki, Berlin, Istanbul, London, Malmo, and was artist-in-residence in Istanbul, Berlin and Riga.
