doc. art. Nika Radić

She was born in 1968 in Zagreb. She is an artist who works between sculpture, performance and media art. She graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1992 and art history from the University of Vienna in 2008. She began her artistic work in the tradition of modernist sculpture using a wide range of materials and techniques. Over time, her interest turns to space and less to the object, and she uses interventions in space as a starting point for communication with the audience. Her interest in communication is also related to her life in different countries and cities, the longest of which she lived in Vienna and Berlin. She still maintains a close relationship with Berlin. She has exhibited at over two hundred solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad, and her works have been presented in numerous museums, galleries and public spaces. She is the recipient of many awards and scholarships, including the Radoslav Putar Award in Zagreb, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Scholarship in Venice, the Trieste Contemporary Young Artist Award, the Arts Link Scholarship at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the Villa Kamogawa Scholarship of the Goethe Institute in Kyoto. More at: www.nikaradic.com

My works are created through a process, where one research leads to another. The four-year multidisciplinary project "Message" was a participatory installation and an experiment in communication through a series of exhibitions, a film and a book. It all started with the question of how the audience understands art, and I invited about thirty people professionally related to contemporary art to interpret the installation while I was creating it. The work changed according to their interpretations, revealing how much the perceptions of the observers are conditioned by the knowledge, experience and interests of the participants. As I have shown that observers mostly see what they expect, in the "Hypnos" project, instead of doing a physical exhibition, I hypnotized the observers to see the exhibition they would like to see anyway. Through a number of projects, I have used hypnosis as a method of communication and the structure of exhibition setups. An important shift occurred when, in the project "Everything was green", I hypnotized a larger group of people to see the future they would like to experience. Unexpectedly, the vast majority of participants saw this imagined happy future in green nature, thus diverting my own gaze towards plants and other species. Today, my work deals with the issue of the environment – a topic that determines every possible future. I am interested in how we live with other species and whether we can imagine a different form of existence in the world, and I am also interested in the materials and energy I use.

2024 – "Familienportraits", Burg Klempenow (Germany) 2024 – "24/7, Work Between Meaning and Imbalance", Kunsthaus Graz, Graz 2024 – "Unruly Splendour", Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin 2023 – "Kreuzberger Pflanze", Kotti Shop, Berlin 2023 – "What's Cooking?", Helmhaus, Zurich 2023 – "Futures", Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 2023 – "Where is this cloud sailing?", Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka 2022 – "Extended Present", Ludwig Museum, Budapest 2022 – "Everything Was Green", CLB, Berlin 2020 – "My Voice Will Go With You", Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin