After the successful completion of the 12th edition of the Organ Vida festival, we present the program of the third festival’s off year, in which we continue to explore experimental artistic practices that, using various technologies and media, open up space for new interpretations and provide us with a deeper understanding of the role of the image.
This year’s program is dedicated to examining expanded cinema, or exploring the exhibition potential of moving images in the gallery context. The nvited artists — Anni Puolakka, Tarren Johnson, and Joel Cocks — start from their existing audiovisual works and expand them into gallery spaces through interaction with other media such as text, performance, and installation. The authors consciously play with lo-fi aesthetics and autofiction, becoming characters in their comically intricate and unconventional narratives. Mundane life situations and everyday experiences take on strange dimensions or acquire supernatural and fantastic characteristics. In the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery we will present an exhibition of recent video works by Anni Puolakka and the performance/installation by Tarren Johnson and Joel Cocks.
ANNI PUOLAKKA: HEART MILK
8-ica
26/09 at 20:00
[The exhibition is open until September 30 during gallery hours.]
The works of Finnish artist Anni Puolakka blur the lines between autobiography and fiction, and are grounded in their observations, experiences, and fantasies. They explore the relationship between humans, other living organisms, and the environment. Puolakka’s videos often feature anthropomorphized mammals, parasites, or other predatory organisms that they embody or give voice to. By subverting the roles typical of a species or fetishizing behaviors shared among different species, the artist aims to open new perspectives that have the potential to destabilize existing hierarchies among various living organisms.
Heart Milk comprises an installation based on three video works: “Milk Park,” “From the Heart,” and “Diamond Belly.” Starting from breastfeeding and the collective discomfort it typically provokes when taking place in a public space (“Milk Park”), in videos “From the Heart” and “Diamond Belly,” the artist expands their exploration of the relationship between extraction and corporeality. In ‘From the Heart,’ the artist offers the audience the perspective of an enthusiastic heart parasite, while in ‘Diamond Belly,’ they surrender their body to the bloodthirsty mosquitoes.
Anni Puolakka is a Helsinki-based artist. Their works play with the boundaries and potential of humans as they seek meaningful involvement with other beings and materials. Puolakka experiments with theatrical and cinematic traditions as well as contemporary methods through performance, videos, installations, drawings and texts in which documentary materials are incorporated into fictional worlds. Their works have recently been shown at ARS22 exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), Eye Film Museum (Amsterdam), Baltic Triennial 14 (Vilnius) and BOZAR (Brussels). They received the Finnish State Art Prize in 2022.
TARREN JOHNSON & JOEL COCKS: CORNELIA’S ROOM
GMK
26/09 at 20:00
A play by Tarren Johnson & Joel Cocks
Performed by Medhi Hamadouchi and Salber Lee Williams
Free admission, no registration required.
“Cornelia’s Room” is a distinctive interpretation of the comedy of conversation. Set in an interior that resembles both a medieval chamber and a typical suburban American living room, the performance convincingly captures the grandeur of a court and the casualness of middle-class living space. The plot follows Ivor’s questionably successful attempts to articulate his feelings toward the rightfully skeptical Cornelia. Are Ivor’s unkept promises and neglected oaths merely unfortunate misunderstandings that will eventually be forgiven as a clumsy beginning of a great love story, or are his grandiose romantic projections a problem that should be addressed in therapy? We shall see! The making of “Cornelia’s Room” was filmed and will be the subject of the sixth episode of Dripfeed, titled “Liminal Banquet.
Dripfeed.tv (2018–Ongoing) is a performance practice and video series by Tarren Johnson and Joel Cocks that uses fragments of scripted material and costumes as the foundation for a dialog with the surrounding circumstances. Often unrehearsed and filmed in public places, the text is used as a prompt that leads to momentary transformations and interactions captured through various mediums simultaneously. The episodes are characterized by layered, fragmented, and repetitive editing, voice overs blur into dialogues, lines are repeated by several characters.
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Curators: Barbara Gregov, Lovro Japundžić, Lea Vene.
Design: Alma Šavar
Technical support: Marin Kovačević
Photography: Ive Trojanović
The program is supported by:
The Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City Office for Culture and Civil Society
