November 12, 2015, 7:00pm
Big Ideas in Art & Culture: Lecture by Croatian artists Nadija Mustapić & Toni Meštrović
Location: Bookshelf Cinema, 41 Quebec Street (Please note this venue is not wheelchair accessible.)
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Over the past 20 years, Rijeka’s port, railway and ship-building industry have been undergoing a slow and difficult process. Many citizens have lost their jobs at the remaining factories—those that weren’t closed down in the war-torn period of the 1990s.
Croatian artists Nadija Mustapić and Toni Meštrović will discuss their media-based practice and present their recent audio/video work called A Waiting Room for People, Machines and the City. This artwork provides a poetic documentary look at an important historic site in Rijeka that is undergoing a transition: the train station and port area that houses the shipbuilding industry. This work was commissioned by Musagetes for the railway station waiting room in Rijeka.
The story of the railway and port is a powerful metaphor for the narrative of Croatia itself, which has seen great success, crushing failure and drastic change over time. This work asks us to contemplate how history informs the present and to imagine possible futures for cities like Rijeka.
Nadija Mustapić (www.nadijamustapic.com) is a Rijeka-based artist. She works in video/film; her immersive spatial video installations explore multidimensional relations between the representation of space and its subjectivity. She is an alumnus of the University of Iowa (MFA, 2005) and teaches at Rijeka Academy of Applied Arts.
Toni Meštrović (www.macaknara.hr) is a video artist working predominantly with video and sound installations. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (1999) and at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne (2004). His work addresses themes of cultural heritage, identity and the changes that have occurred in Dalmatia due to the period of transition in Croatia.
Mustapić and Meštrović collaborate on large-scale multimedia projects, which have been installed at museums and galleries. Their collaborative work captures social issues and expands categories of documentarism into spatial and poetic immersive sensory experiences.