GREEN DCP AWARD for a Croatian film in the program
Stitch the Ruin by Željka Blakšić (Gita Blak)
"A film that won us over with its tactility, atmosphere and originality with which it explores the socialist heritage and the issues of work and gender through artistic means."
RPM festival, an artist run festival, is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, cinematic work in experiments, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance.
Revolutions Per Minute Festival 2024 was co-hosted by Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, MFA Boston , Goethe-institut Boston , Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard CAMLab.
https://www.25fps.hr/program/2024/refleksi
A special program wholly dedicated to Croatian experimental scene, 𝑹𝒆𝒇𝒍𝒆𝒙𝒆𝒔, is scheduled before the official opening, to be shown at 6 PM✨. Six experimental films by Croatian filmmakers were selected thanks to their audacity to challenge the familiar notions of cinema.
New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced the recipients and finalists of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program, which it has administered for the past 39 years with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). NYFA has awarded a total of $696,000 to 87 artists (including 3 collaborations) throughout New York State, whose ages range from 25-79 years, in the following disciplines: Fiction, Folk/Traditional Arts, Interdisciplinary Work, Painting, and Video/Film.
https://www.vsw.org/exhibition/zeljka-blaksic/
FROM JUNE 5TH - JULY 3RD
Kunsthalle Exnergasse opening on the 5th of June, 6pm
Artists: Joshua Nierodzinski, Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak, Sara Shaoul, Enrico Floriddia
Curator: Rashmi Viswanathan
Four artists each take a different approach to the dynamics of collectivity and futures as they might exist in our collective imagination. They offer a multi-perspective look at the way we understand our relationships with one another and at fundamental media structures that reinforce, inhibit or liberate our speech. Their media explorations in the context of collective practices expand the field of participation far beyond the walls of the exhibition space. Some positions look back , to the languages and media forms through which we have learned to understand our history. Others, in turn, look forward , to the possibility of how language could speak a new future. Although from different perspectives, the artists are concerned with the simplest of all ideas - collective storytelling as a momentary act of liberation.
PRECOG MAGAZINE launch party, May 11th from noon till 5:30pm, copies of the newest issue will be available, and the talk starts at 3pm.
University of Hartford, APRIL 8th at 5pm
UTILE TIES, exhibition by Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak and Lily Moebes for the Mollie Ruprecht Fellowship at University of Vermont. “Utile Ties” refers to the artists’ shared interest in the radical potential of usefulness and the utilitarian. Their work situates everyday objects and processes within an embodied idea of usefulness, particularly a gendered, working body, with an immediacy that suggests a need to dismantle conventional forms as well as an optimism in their undoing.
“Utile Ties” will be on display at the Francis Colburn Gallery from March 19th.
Please join us for an artist talk and opening reception at 6PM on Wednesday March 20th.
Performance/screening November 4th at Isabel Bader Theater at 8pm, Toronto
Artist talk will be on November 5th at The ArtSci Salon, University of Toronto from 4pm-7pm.
Stitch The Ruin, 2023 by Gita Blak
OPEN AIR SCREENING SERIES presents 16MM films on LOOP visible from a distance from dusk until dawn.
72 ROCKWELL PLACE, Brooklyn, New York 11217 - Between BRIC Media Arts Center & BAM Rose Cinemas.
FULL DETAILS BELOW: MONO NO AWARE Details
Dusk on FRIDAY October 20th until Dawn SATURDAY October 21st ** OPENING NIGHT **
Dusk on SATURDAY October 21st until Dawn SUNDAY October 22nd
On the 16th of October film "Cracks", part of the multimedia performance "Patterns from Nature" will be presented with live chamber music. In this work composer Quinsin Nachoff joins forces with physicist Dr Stephen Morris and filmmakers Udo Prinsen, Tina de Groot, Lee Hutzulak and Gita Blak. Premiere performance is set for Monday, 8pm at Hunter College - Lang Recital Hall. Blending jazz and classical elements, the compositions are performed live by a chamber ensemble featuring woodwinds, brass, percussion, piano, string quartet, bass, drum set, and conductor.
AUGUST 3rd- 19th
If Work brings into conversation artists, curators and writers who have spent the past year investigating the relationship between art and labor for the 2022-23 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. Its title is drawn from IATP’s Distinguished Faculty Guest Julia Bryan-Wilson and her text Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, which traces the development of the ‘art worker’ in the 1970s as a collective political identity. What the category implies, she argues, is that the labor of art has shifted from a focus on the processes of artmaking and towards the broader socio-political matrices in which artists produce. The writings of philosopher Herbert Marcuse are identified as exercising particular influence on this transition, as he believed that revolution should synthesize work and art: “If work were accompanied by a reactivation of pre-genital polymorphous eroticism, then it would tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work content.” That is, if work were combined with instinctual gratification—play—then it would be pleasurable without losing productivity, a bulwark against alienated labor.
ARTISTS: Annabelle heckler, Brett Ginsburg, Chris Kojzar, Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak, Kayla Weisdorf, Kearra Amaya Gopee
Li-Ming Hu, Lily Moebes, Naomi Lisiki
CURATORS: Francesca Altamura and Miranda Samuels
PUBLICATION: Laura Serejo Genes & Kiyoto Koseki
Based in New York City and supported by Jack Shainman Gallery…
––Words by Christine Bootes, 2022–23 IATP Cohort
Based in New York City, The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program is designed to facilitate the examination of both dominant and under-recognized epistemological frameworks that inform the system of art, including its production, consumption, distribution, and exhibition.
The 2022-2023 seminars will examine themes around art and labor. Within this framework, we will focus on historical, political, and aesthetic perspectives related to conventional and non-conventional notions of art and labor practices. Particular attention will be paid to: the historical materialist method and critiques of the euro centrism there within; organized and spontaneous labor movements and their theorists; theories of class constitution and formation; intersections between class and identity formations; and the vexed relationship between postmodern theory and materialist analysis.
#JackShainmanGallery
(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies
with a lecture by professor André Lepecki
4 November 2021, 6pm CET, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin
(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies
Edited by Maayan Sheleff, Dr Sarah Spies
ISBN 9798744646660
www.on-curating.org/book/UnCommoning-Voices-and-NonCommunal-Bodies
(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies is a new publication in OnCurating academic book series, edited by Maayan Sheleff and Dr Sarah Spies. Connecting studies of the voice and theories of the body via the politics of performativity, the publication complicates the collateral understanding of power and agency inherent in collective or communal address and participation.
The book launch will include an online lecture by performance studies scholar and curator Professor André Lepecki, live from NYC; Lepecki will discuss the politics of movement and its pause during the pandemic, followed by a conversation with Lepeki and editors Sheleff and Spies.
(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies takes as its starting point the project Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies, curated by Sheleff and Spies for Reading International, UK (2019), which included artworks and workshops by Zbyněk Baladrán, Željka Blakšić, Marco Godoy, Chto Delat/Dmitry Vilensky, Noam Inbar and Nir Shauloff, Jamila Johnson-Small/Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Mikhail Karikis, Tali Keren, Public Movement, Michal Oppenheim, Rory Pilgrim, Jack Tan, Nina Wakeford and Katarina Zdjelar.
August 2020
Connect the Dots
SERIES OF PRINTS
by: Željka Blakšic AKA Gita Blak
https://fordhamuniversitygalleries.com/artwork/4777411-eljka-Blak-ic-AKA-Gita-Blak.html
Connect the Dots by Željka Blakšic started years ago as a drawing game made for a Game Night series of free public events presenting artist-made games, organized by Sheetal Prajapati and Anna Harsanyi at Soho20 Gallery in New York City. Participants were invited to connect the dots in order to reveal and discover a female revolutionary portrait. All the women represented in the series of prints played a pivotal role in their community and later society; as activists, theorists, educators and politicians in launching the revolution or bringing in a monumental social change that enriched the lives of many. Here we remember them and celebrate their bravery, selflessness, dedication and complexity.
Lakshmi Sahgal (Captain Lakshmi)
Polymer relief print on Arches Cover
13 x 18 inches
Printed by Ruth Lingen at Line Press Ltd and published by Planthouse Gallery
Mildred Beltré, Željka Blakšić, Sarah Jorgensen, and Rachel Ostrow
Who are We Talking With? What Can Institutions (Un)Learn from Artists?
symposium organized as part of the first edition of the
Biennale Matter of Art / Ve věci umění held in Prague, Czech Republic.
Participants: tranzit.cz – Tereza Stejskalová, Vít Havránek, Veronika Janatková (CZ), Krytyka Polityczna - Igor Stokfiszewski (PL), Željka Blakšić alias Gita Blak (HR), James & Brea McAnnaly/ The Luminary (USA), Emília Rigová (SK), Andang Kelana (ID), Sráč Sam (CZ), Jiří Skála (CZ), Ruti Sela (ILl), Chto Delat - Dmitry Vilensky (RU), Alarm - Saša Uhlová, Jan Bělíček (CZ), Illia Gladshtein (UA), Mark Wilson (United Kingdom), Alex Martinis Roe (GB), Jonas Staal (NL), Marcus Steinweg (DE), Lucy Lopez (GB)
Moderators: Tereza Stöckelová, Igor Stokfiszewski, James McAnnaly, Anna Remešová
During the symposium, artists, art ensembles and delegates from art institutions will meet to debate issues concerning cultural projects, institutions and audiences.
26/04/19 — 02/06/19
Curated by Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies.
Zbyněk Baladrán, Željka Blakšić, Marco Godoy, Mikhail Karikis, Tali Keren, Rory Pilgrim, Jack Tan, and Katarina Zdjelar
OpenHand OpenSpace
(Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies is a series of workshops, performances, and an exhibition, interrogating the relationship between artistic practices and protest movements via the performative scores of collective bodies and voices. The interdisciplinary program was inspired by the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp which was active from 1981 to 2000. It was established by women to protest nuclear weapons being sited near Reading at RAF Greenham Common.
Other participating artists, speakers, and writers:
Susan Gibb, Marco Godoy, Chto Delat/Dmitry Vilensky, Noam Inbar and Nir Shauloff, Jamila Johnson-Small/Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Mikhail Karikis, Tali Keren, André Lepecki, Florian Malzacher, Public Movement, Michal Oppenheim, Rory Pilgrim, Yvonne Rainer, Edgar Schmitz, Jack Tan, Nina Wakeford, Catherine Wood, Sara Wookey and Katarina Zdjelar.
+ March 26th, opening at Home of HDLU (Zagreb, Croatia)
Curated by Branka Benčić and Tevž Logar.......”Considering the background and perspective of the Zagreb Salon the curatorial proposal is formed kaleidoscopically, as a reflection of multiple perspectives and positions. On the one hand, with a twenty-year break, we recall the City scapes (1998) Salon, curated by Igor Zabela, on which this exhibition leans, contemplating continuities and discontinuities, opportunities and perspectives, filled and unfulfilled potentials and aspirations, curatorial practices and institutional history of the exhibition”.......
