“SO LAST YEAR” is an exhibition – installation project that brings together six authors who gathered under the title SAD GIRLS COLLECTIVE.
Martina Granić, Marina Jukić, Nina Bačun, Iva Markovac, Dora Đurkesac and Iva Korenčić in collaboration with curator Irena Tomašić are referring to “girls empowerment” in popular culture within the Sad Girl theory and the fourth wave feminism. The exhibition remains open from 21st – 28th October.
Through the virtual collective pooling and exchange of viral information, the SAD GIRLS COLLECTIVE questioned the recent phenomena of the mainstream Internet aesthetics of the so called Tumblr girls to Sad Girls / Sad Boys culture and their visual branded products, guided exclusively through intuitive approach based on intimate aspirations and expressions.
The Internet promotes hyper-productive pop culture that through social networks creates new trends and continues to support demand and consumption by making viral phenomena an esthetic statement but also a lifestyle. So, we live in a fairly subtle and ironic world where every concept and even feminism succeeded in capitalizing and becoming consumer goods. Somewhat ironically, but again recognizing their own femininity, the artists have created a joint critical, but definitely positivist, reflection on the viral phenomena of depicting a sad girl on the Internet by exploring their own position of emotions and bodies by observing forms of the forgotten female principle in the imposed paradigms of contemporary society accepting the ambivalence of male-female relations just by nurturing the present emotional diversity.
Seeing the position of women as an object of marketing and cosmetic manipulation, “SO LAST YEAR” empowerment cynically reflects on the transience of viral trends and actually suggests that sad girls are already in the pass, while cultural appropriation has created a new trend of nail girls.
In the concept of a pedicure salon, the Collective builds an expanded space of women’s solidarity and exchanges of women’s experience away from the ears of men, creating a safe space for exchange, while the nails themselves become weapons, not signs of aesthetic beauty or weakness. On the other hand, yet another ubiquitous trend of statement t-shirts was used as a template for creating antimanifest, always subtly packed into a marketable and aesthetically-priced branded consumer goods.
The project was realized and supported by the City Office for Education, Culture and Sport of the City of Zagreb in collaboration with Miroslav Kraljević Gallery.
