Artist:

Igor Grubić (born 1969, Zabreb, Croatia; lives and works in Zagreb)

Materials:

Video, 50 minutes

Description:

A video portrait of nine socialist-era monuments in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“The work provides almost no contextual information (dates, titles, or locations) and relies on the interplay between the timeless otherworldly appearance of the structures, subdued sound effects, and the ambiance of the surrounding landscape. […] The artist offers both too little historical information and a sense of how every detail might be activated as a historical object, and every moment mapped across multiple historical and temporal narratives. […] Grubić is not simply (re)discovering forgotten ruins from the past, or documenting historical decay, he is capturing the process of change in social and political consciousness. […] Monument registers the passing of time in transition between socialism and nationalism (…) Grubić’s portraits of monuments, through their focus on absent action, reassure us that the present is always pregnant with possibility for a more successful future.” — Uros Cvoro, Transitional Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp.116-121.

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