About — Željka Blakšić

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gitablak@gmail.com

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Željka Gita Blakšić AKA Gita Blak is a visual artist, filmmaker, and educator invested in the moving image, performativity of archival practices and countercultural histories. She uses analogue lens-based media (photography, 16mm film), prints and artists books to honor the tensions between personal and collective histories on the edge of erasure. She often collaborates with musicians, activists, urbanists, and students, through workshops and performances, creating sites to practice collectivity within the framework of contemporary art.

Željka arrived at her artist practice through music and performance rooted in the ‘90s-era youth subculture in Yugoslavia (Croatia), where she was a part of Zagreb’s all girl noise-punk band, the Schizoid Wiklers’. As agents of larger anarcho and eco movements, they rejected pervasive ethno-nationalism and sexism. This experimental environment offered the principles and methodologies of resistance that translate into Blak’s art practice until this day.

Centering spontaneity, rebellion, and play, her work begins with found objects, old magazines, garments, and discarded educational 16mm films. Željka subjects images to miscellaneous processes such as collaging, assembling, burning, bleaching, and painting. The aim is to achieve transmutation, significant changes in the physical or chemical properties of the material, while simultaneously prolonging life of the archive as a whole. She uses found footage as a proof, a historical occurrence which she connects with the original moving images and contemporary documents, creating a visual language imbued with evocative potential —a sort of displaced self-portraiture— that echoes larger cultural and historical meanings through poetics of resistance.

Željka holds an MFA from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) - Photography, Video and Related Media (NY) and BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Most recently she was a participant at the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in NYC. She presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Anonymous Gallery (NY), AIR Gallery (NY), BRIC Brooklyn, The Kitchen (NY), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), Gallery Augusta (Helsinki), Urban Festival (Zagreb), Gallery of SESI (São Paulo), The Khyber Center for the Arts (Halifax, CA) among many others. Selected awards include the Residency Unlimited & National Endowment for the Arts Award, Fondazione Pistoletto Residency (Italy), MuseumsQuartier Program (Vienna), Recess Session (NY), A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship Program (NY), Paula Rhodes Award (NY), and Alserkal Avenue in Dubai (UAE).