Martina Miholić

Download Katalog

An instruction for rapprochement presents a project 6’s title for upcoming exhibition taken from the cold and austere dictionary of bureaucratic terminology of various political organizations , as it is an example of those who should reproach croatia towards the EU. nevertheless the positive connotations of it, the term rapprochement seems to emanate a particular sense of discomfort for the reason, if there is a need to reproach something, it inevitably means that there is a certain distance of it....in spatial, emotional, intellectual, financial or any other sense.. A step forward is highly unlikely...and therefore easier to linger in the distance, as it presents a detachment from the content. We are easily discarding the fact that we are a part of the highly alienated society, as we are infected by it from the times when we were breast fed on our mothers chest which seamlessly runs to the very moment when we were given our first mobile device or computer as our further initiation within the communication whose peaks of emotional stimuli are expressed in the virtual smile widgets. paradoxically whilst physical remoteness can be cancelled by a single click of the mouse, the human being as such has never been emotionally more distant from another. losing a self in the moments of furious tapping of 160 character text messages on our mobile devices we are detaching a self from the momentary, a present, slowly typing away the means of basic human communication, until the external discordance becomes a mirror of the internal one.

Writing a foreword for Project 6 previous exhibition, Ivana Mestrov has highlighted how Martina Miholic frequently features herself in her work through the tactics of self exploration. After she exposed herself openly to various reactions through image of body (“Dogma”exhibition) and character traits (work“Tagbox”/ “Stereotypes and prejudices exhibition”), Martina now exposes her sketches for open commenting. This might not be anything new to the general art practice, artists frequently do that, do they? They might, but common imposed logics and functional curator practice rather tend to interpret the artwork in the form of the catalogue prologues. Inverting the process, as an artwork itself Martina issues her own “Catalogue”, a booklet compiled of various commentaries and reactions of her colleagues, students, curators, art critics and randomly chosen friends that might not necessarily understand art (art is after all-artificial! remark by an author) collected over time. Actual work is disclosed from it’s viewers until the visit to her website or the date of actual opening, thus inverting the expected artist-work-interpretor sequence and questioning it’s complexity. Actually up to this moment i haven’t had a look at Martina’s sketches, nevertheless finding the way of imagining them through other peoples interpretation quiet enjoyable, further amplifying my curiosity of what’s yet to come. The foreword written by the curator who hadn’t seen the work, a novelty some may say, but i readily proclaim: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”. as it wasn’t my intention to ironize nor blasphemy , just merely point out that Maja, Tea, Martina, Karla and Zdravko revolve around the thought how that approach or“a step forward” is built on uncertainty, unpredictability , and encompasses both hard and easy. Luckily it lasts for a lifetime, to teach us a few lessons along the way.

Barbara Vujanovic