VASJA IRMA IVKOVIĆ / VELCRO
FROM THE PREFACE TO THE EXHIBITION Life Wisdom or Learned Lesson in Folk Proverbs has the task of transforming and elevating individual experience to the level of a general scale. Its goal is to become a support or guideline that makes it easier to cope with situations in everyday life. A proverb is a concise and clear representation of reality, and often carries the cultural ethos of the area in which it is used. The proverb ... Read More
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
Life wisdom or a learned lesson in folk proverbs has the task of transforming and elevating an individual experience to the level of a general scale. Its goal is to become a support or guideline that makes it easier to cope with situations in everyday life. A proverb is a concise and clear representation of reality, and often carries the cultural ethos of the area in which it is used.
The proverb U se na poda describes an instinctive social community that is maintained by impulse-reflex dynamics. The reflex of life here is focused on physiological needs, self-maintenance and survival. It denotes the biological imperative: to satisfy hunger, to protect the body, to satisfy the instinct. With its message, it reduces the complexity of human relationships to the level of instinct, whereby almost any means that lead to the goal is allowed, including the abuse of circumstances at the expense of others. From it we can read the given framework of human action guided by predetermined goals that "must" be satisfied. The one who succeeds in this justifies the purpose of his existence in such a social community, in which relationships between people are reduced to usefulness and functionality.
Velcro escapes the proverb from the predetermined framework of individualistic pragmatics using the principles of Gestalt therapy and observes it as a possible map for understanding relational existence (environment-individual), examines the illusory nature of mutual emancipation and sets a new characteristic of their relation – stickiness.
Vasja Irma Ivković
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vasja Irma Ivković (2001, Zagreb) is a visual artist whose practice is based on rhizome research meodologies, combining photography, publishing and performativity. Through irony and everyday observations, she builds alternative narratives that develop through different media. Her current projects explore non-linear storytelling through art books, spatially specific installations and participatory formats that question conventional ways of presenting and distributing artistic work.
She completed her graduate university studies in graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2025. She has participated in about twenty group exhibitions, and in 2024 she held a solo exhibition Field of Open Reading at the VN Gallery. She is one of the winners of the Rector's Award for exceptional team scientific and artistic work on Boris Papandopulo's opera Amphitryon (2023). She is currently doing a professional internship at the Druckwerk Wien graphic studio in Vienna.
The exhibition in the Šira Gallery can be viewed during the Gallery's working hours (Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., 6-8 p.m., Saturday: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) until 16.12.2025.
The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb.