MKC Split Gallery / Youth Centre (Gallery opening hours: from 2pm tp 9pm every day except Sundays and holidays)
Ulica slobode 28
March 22 – April 14, 2018
Exhibition opening: March 22, 19:00pm
Ana Bilankov is a multimedia artist, born in Zagreb, and lives and works in Berlin. Her conceptual and contextual practice includes media photography, video/exerimental film, installations and texts. Bilankov’s work have been shown internationally in art venues as film and video festivals, where she has been among the prizewinners. She has won several grants and residencies, e.g. at Residency Unlimited and Pioneer Works in New York, and recently received a research stipend from the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin.
The Smiling Sun exhibition takes its title from the latest two-channel audio-video installation, which is now making its premiere for the Croatian public, and has been conceived as an overview of the artist’s recent multimedia work that was produced, for the most part, during her residency in New York. As it is otherwise characteristic for Ana Bilankov’s work, it examines the phenomena of identity, place and time (specific and abstract), as well as individual, collective and psycho-geographic memory.
The idea of the artwork Smiling Sun was created during the artist’s residency at Pioneer Works in New York in 2015, where she was researching the history of a cruise ship, “born” as the Galileo Galilei in Genoa in 1961. Many times during her life the ship changed her name, owners, continents and gender identity (due to grammatical difference in languages), and she sank in the seas of Indonesia in 1999. The third in the series of her identities – the Meridian, was the first so-called celebrity cruiser which sailed the route of New York-Miami-Caribbean islands and on which, once, the artist’s brother worked before his “disappearance”. In this way the history of the ship includes a dimension of personal history and loss.
