A Video View OnOn the Development of the New Art Scene in Rijeka 1995 – 2000
Milieu, the artistic context, the locally confined frame where the experimental films and videos by Tanja Golić as well as the unconventional and excessive video installations by Alen Floričić have found their artistic and logistic support, is a co- related transmedial determination of the new art scene in Rijeka – innovative, experimental and in general oriented towards new media. The scene was declaratively articulated and self-assuredly manifested in 1995, thanks to the appearance and reformatory directed actionism of the Group of Young Artists (Lara Badurina, Jasna šikanja, Melita Sorola Staničić, Predrag Todorović, and other multimedia-creative students from the Teacher Training College, Rijeka and artistic collaborators from Croatia and abroad). The happening was self-organized, non-institutional with results that could be best described as numerous shocks, stressful situations, conceptual- performance overlapping of the imposed boundaries and customs. These were the first promising leaps into the domain of the new-media art sources, paths and practices that mediate radical ideas about artistic act – ideas beyond the classical idioms of graphics, painting or sculpture.
This new sensibility off-and-within the Group of Young Artists (recently licensed as URA association) incited a young graphic artist Tanja Golić to experiment with video art refering discretely to the Body, Sound, Environment; Performance and Body Art transferred through the New Media practice as well as the experimental cinema and the avant-garde video tradition, especially the pioneer works of Dalibor Martinis and Sanja Iveković from the ‘70s. A painter and a sculptor Alen Floričić chose the analogue artistic blind-flight in 1997. Floričić participated in group exhibitions with Badurina, šikanja, Golić švrljuga- Milić, Todorović, Sorola and other artists from Rijeka (for example the project of Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka: ‘Rijeka`s Contemporary Artists – A Part of Croatian Art Scene‘), that were a conceptual response to the Igor Zidić’s 1991/92 pancroatian project ‘New Croatian Art’.
In 1995 a number of actions, performances and site specific exhibitions by Rijeka`s Group alias the Club – Tanja Golić participated in video documentation and presentation – marked the starting point of the practice that aimed to conquer alternative paths, venues and methodologies of gallery and non-gallery multimedia actions. This achievment was recognised in the first issues of Fanzin and recorded on videotapes (1995-1998).
This ‘informal’ trend in Rijeka was recently enriched with Tanja Dabo’s project of ‘one-day-shows’ that in the ‘Small Salon’ and ‘Gallery O.K.’ (MMC Palach) featured Alen Floričić, Igor Grubić, Sandro Ðukić and Igor Zlobec, already familiar to Rijeka audience. The relatively unconventional and original approach towards the artistic act and work is a trade mark of a few more protagonists of the Rijeka art scene: Lada Sega, Tomislav Ćurković, David Maljković, Damir Stojnić, Nikola Ukić, Damir Božić-Pišta, but on this occasion they shall be mentioned only as the honourable assembly of the (ex) Group of Young Artists and URA association, exposed to the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the ‘scene’ (art, dance, mime, theatre and music) evolving from other art centres.
At this point I would like to stress the significant appearance of the two new and non- typical video artists in Rijeka – Tanja Golić and Alen Floričić, although the last one is equally close to Labin Art Express and the Istrian scene. In order to define their position within Rijeka’s scene we can only conditionally place them somewhere near the art practice of Lara Badurina, Lada Sega or even Davide Grassi of whose interests we’ve been reported directly from Ljubljana. Apart from the video art which, in fact, is Tanja’s main interest, their simmilarity and at the same time difference is in the specific perception of the body. They both reduce this living organic object by the process of rhytmically structured/destructed media extraction to the elementary functions of the movement, jerks or breathing. This decentered, iterated and rhythmically varied vision of body is a result of interaction between the detached components of the individual body’s or separate organ’s image with media technology that they use to reconstruct the subject to the body-sight-sound complex. The impression of directness of the Body is in the paradoxical and stressful way exaggerated and intensified due to the anxious fact of its aggressive alienation coming from the combination of the concept itself and the artistic exploitation – representation. These works correspond to the extreme artistic and performance practices and perceptive effects used by action artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s to the contemporary cyber performers like Stelarc or Marcel Lí Antúnez. The works of Tanja Golić (video installations and projections) contain a certain lyrical, emotional, even poetic note emanating through her visualization of the corporeal, living movements, action and sublime ‘music’ of breathing. Floričić’s video and print installations reveal his preoccupation with the ruthless minimalism marked with the consciously enhanced, almost to the point of fixation, mechanical aspects of the represented object. Irritating repetitions, shocking lightning and sound signals flowing from his black-and-white simultaneous video projections are equally convincing if contemplated from the existentialistic and the psychosomatic point of view. For the time being, that would be all about the rare, but consequential video lightning and signals from the windy Kvarner.
Branko Cerovac
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Alen Floričić
Born in 1968 in Pula graduated in 1993 from the Faculty of Arts in Rijeka, Departement of Sculpture (®arko Violić) he is a member of artists’ association HDLU Istra, HDLU Rijeka, HDLU Zagreb till 1995 works with traditional painting and sculptural media, since 1995 he produces installations ambiences and urban interventions
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Tanja Golic – was born in 1973 in Rijeka graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Departement of Graphics (J. Butković) senior student of the Departement of Croatian language and literature works as cammerman and set designer for the independent TV station Kanal RI
