Niko Mihaljević

Winner of the prestigious Croatian national award Radoslav Putar 2016, the artist and graphic designer Niko Mihaljević explores the metaphysical aspects of mundane rituals and leisure time in a variety of media with an emphasis on conceptual sound composition, installations, performance, text, and artist books. His role is that of a subjective documentarist, a field sound recordist, a meticulous transcriber of banalities, a self-involved present-day archeologist and, subsequently, a multimedia mythographer. In his practice, Mihaljević attempts to bridge the divide between the banal and the transcendental, transforming ordinary social situations into performative acts such as: setting up a public sound performance of crossword solving by using a heavily amplified pencil; deconstructing the act of listening to recorded popular music by attempting to interact with John Lennon in an ad hoc spiritual séance setting; organizing a series of weekly one-hour urban ethnographic expeditions to local fast food shops which were recorded and then painstakingly transcribed and scored on a church organ; organizing and documenting a five-hour circumnavigation (round trip) of a small island in the Adriatic to parallel the grandiose endeavours of antiquity; composing a piece of serious music based on tape recordings from an intoxicated reggae themed house party, etc.