In Bologna, Slaven Tolj's first solo exhibition in an Italian public museum

As part of Art City Bologna 2023, the Collezioni Comunali d’Arte of Palazzo d’Accursio will welcome from January 26 to March 5, 2023 the solo exhibition of Slaven Tolj (Dubrovnik, HR, 1964), entitled Craquelure. Pavo and me, curated by Daniele Capra. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in an Italian public museum.

Some 15 object and documentary works will be on display for the occasion, and on Feb. 4 (at 7 p.m.) and Feb. 5 (at 11 a.m.) there will be a performance Bologna, February 2023, created especially for the Bologna museum.

The exhibition, which will range from sculpture to photography, from performance to the site-specific intervention created for the Sala Urbana, intends to trace the Croatian artist’s path by emphasizing his ability to pose as an interstitial element with respect to inner, interpersonal and political dynamics. Starting from his beginnings in the late 1980s to recent works that bear witness to the vicissitudes due to a stroke that undermined his linguistic abilities, the practice of body art andconceptual art are central to him: his work is fueled by a continuous exchange with human and professional events experienced firsthand. The exhibition is intended to be an intimate narrative conducted through the personal and historical events that marked Tolj’s life, beginning with the tragic dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Those tragic events experienced are alluded to in the title by the dedication to his photographer friend Pavo Urban, who was a victim of the war in Dubrovnik on December 6, 1991, and whose two photographs documenting Tolj’s Rosarium performance in 1988 are exhibited.

In the action A tattoo of the logo of Rijeka’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (2013), made in the weeks following his appointment as director of the MMSU museum, the artist has the museum’s logo tattooed on his shoulders. It is a work that is both intimate and political, in which the artist testifies to his personal dedication to his new institutional role; but, as he is also an artist, it highlights the fact of how museums are perceived as a brand and a measure of value of one’s work.

In Community Spirit in Action (1998), Tolj performs in a Zagreb peep show together with a stripper, presenting his own body lying completely helpless, covered by a cloth. The work highlights the paradoxical condition of being a body artist whose presence passes socially almost hidden, while a woman’s body is, on the contrary, sought after and desired by the gaze.

The photograph Untitled (1997) bears witness to the removal of the majestic chandeliers of the Church of St. Ignatius, Dubrovnik, so that they could not fall on people, which occurred during the fighting in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The objects were thus replaced with simple industrial light bulbs with no identity.

In the performance Dubrovnik-Valencia-Dubrovnik (2003) Tolj remains shirtless after removing a dozen pieces of clothing, each of which has a black button symbolizing a friend lost in the war. At that point he tears off one of the buttons and decides to sew it onto his own skin, using needle and thread, as if it were a medal to be pinned to his chest. But, on the contrary, this gesture becomes a sign of mourning, of a pain that denudes and from which one can no longer free oneself.

The work is, in Tolj’s poetics, an element of mediation and relationship between the artist, his body and the context in which it is generated. Through his own presence, to minimal actions conducted with his own body, to displacements of small objects, Tolj wants to highlight the cracks and flays that life and history cause on the fabric of existence, like the craquelure that occurs on the surface of oil paintings as the years pass. Without rhetoric, with a spare and necessary language, the artist interrogates the viewer and invests him with an intense emotional charge, revealing with his works the rawness of reality.

The exhibition is a project of Galerie Michaela Stock, Vienna, realized with the support of Kontakt Collection, Vienna, in collaboration with Art Radionica Lazareti, Dubrovnik and Settore Musei Civici Bologna | Musei Civici d’Arte Antica.

The exhibition is on view Saturday, Feb. 4 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday from 2 to 7 p.m., Wednesday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and midweek holidays from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Admission during Art City Bologna and Arte Fiera: Feb. 2 to 5, 2023 free for Arte Fiera ticket holders.

Full museum ticket 6 euros, reduced 3 euros, reduced special youth between 19 and 25 years 2 euros. Free for Culture Card holders.

Image: Installation view of Craquelure. Pavo and Me. Collezioni Comunali d’Arte, Bologna, 2022

In Bologna, Slaven Tolj's first solo exhibition in an Italian public museum

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