WHW curatorial collective from Zagreb has announced that the concept for the next Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is going to be based on the artworks by performance artist Antonio Lauer aka Tom Gotovac and performative collective BADco. while exibited at Arsenale.
WHW initiated the project in 1998 when independent alternative publishing house Arkzin published 150th anniversary edition of the Marx’s Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Slavoj Zizek, took its shape in the area in which the considerations about possibilities of political and artistic engagement were interlocked with issues of local daily politics. The collective has curated a wide range of international exhibitions around the world, most notably the Istanbul Biennale 2009.
Many years of consistent work in the field of experimental film and performance, made Tomislav Gotovac one of the most important Croatian contemporary artists. Gotovac began to transfer daily activities to art sphere with public performances such as Haircut and Shaves (1970, 1971) Watching TV (1980). In 1971 he acts in Lazar Stojanović’s film Plastic Jesus. The film was banned due its subversive content and Gotovac was not allowed to graduate till 1976. In 1971 Gotovac have run naked through Belgrade’s Sremska Street. The performance was reencted ten years later in Zagreb’s main street Ilica for Zagreb, I love you (running naked, kissing the asphalt) performance, which shocked dormant environment. In 2005 Gotovac has changed his name to Antonio Lauer. He died in 2010.
BADco. is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb, Croatia. Reconfiguring established relations between performance and audience, challenging perspectival givens and architectonics of performance, problematizing of communicational structures – all of that makes BADco. an internationally significant artistic phenomenon and one of the most differentiated performance experiences.
MV
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