Musagetes and CAFKA - Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area are excited to announce that Croatian media artists Nadija Mustapić and Toni Meštrović will be speaking as part of the Big Ideas in Art & Culture Lecture Series. The lecture and film screening will take place on Thursday, November 12, 2015 at the Bookshelf (41 Quebec St. in Guelph). This location is not physically accessible. Please join us for a glass of lemonade and a small bite starting at 6:30 PM. Admission is free but tickets are required to secure your seat. Reserve your seat by registering online.
Over the past 20 years, Rijeka’s port, railway and shipbuilding 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 titled 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 housing the shipbuilding industry. This work was commissioned by Musagetes in 2014 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. To learn more about this lecture, please visit cafka.org/lectures.
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.
This lecture and screening is presented as a part of Spur Guelph. Over three days, the Spur Guelph Festival offers lectures, conversations, musical performances, literary readings, film screenings and city walks that will consider how we can imagine new possibilities for the world beyond the status quo. The program invites us to pause and to think together poetically as we imagine our futures—and then go out into the world to bring them into reality. For more information about Spur, please visit www.spurfestival.ca.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Shawn Van Sluys
Executive Director, Musagetes
519 836 7300 x106
[email protected]
www.musagetes.ca