Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

When in Zagreb, I stayed an extra night to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in this new building, which was perhaps not intuitively laid out or well lit in the temporary exhibition spaces, but overall was large and interesting.

Their collection naturally focuses on Croatian artists, and I found their documentation from the Fluxis period–an interest of mine–especially strong. Overall the thematic curation was interrupted by a temporary installation of design pieces of Karim Rashid, complete with big video screen of him talking about his work, which I found distracting and repetitive, seeing as it was on every floor of the permanent collection. There were some outstanding artists from Croatia whose work I really enjoyed getting to see for the first time, including:

Mladen Stilonavic, 1993

1950s photography of Zvonimir Brkan, From Liliput and Fisherman

Milislav Mio Vesovic, Photo-sequence of the action “Zagreb, I love you!”

Zlatko Kopljar, K9 Compassion, 2005 (series of 5 photographs where the artist kneels in front of Parliament buildings)

But then, how can you not like a museum that you exit via Carsten Holler’s permanent double slide installation?