Kata Mijatović
Unconscious – Canal Grande, 2013
ink-jet print, ALU plate
87 x 130 cm
MG-8519

Kata Mijatović
Canal Grande, 2013
MP4 / 35’ 13’’
MG-8529

In her exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Kata Mijatović (1957) continued her artistic work dedicated to dreams. The exhibition consisted of an interactive database “Dream Archive”, ambient installations “Between the Sky and the Earth” and “Coal from the Unconscious” and a per-formance, which took place in various spaces around the city. In the performance, the artist moves through Venetian canals, lying in a gondola and sleeping. The black gondola was repurposed for the performance and became white, and the gondolier substituted his standard sailor outfit with black clothes. And while the photo shows the gondola during a normally busy part of the day, the video documentation shows the artist, being driven by the gondolier through completely empty canals. This supplies the performance with a kind of somnolent quality, that the curator of the Croatian exhibition, Branko Franceschi, connected with the works of “Gustav Doré, Joachim Patenier, Arnold Böcklin, Mirko Rački and others”, and in which the phenomenon of “crossing over to the other side” played an important role. In Kata Mijatović’s artistic work, crossing over does not refer to crossing the border between the world of the living and the dead, but, as Franceschi notes, to crossing the border between consciousness and subconsciousness, that is between wakefulness and sleep. “What interests me is the dichotomy of the mind, this conscious I that occupies almost the entire sphere of our activity and our life and the unconscious that we see when we are woken up by dreams of when we remember them.”, said the artist on one occasion. The exhibition in Venice attracted considerable public interest, especially the part in which the audience could store their own dreams in the artist’s database. “I saw myself as an artist whose works are closed, uncommu-nicative, however, the work I presented at the Biennale showed that the question of the conscious and the unconscious is a universal theme with a universal resonance.”
In 1981, Kata Mijatović graduated from the Faculty of Law in Osijek. From 1988 to 1991, she was a member of the informal art group “Močvara” (“Swamp”) in Beli Manastir. In 1991, she entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and in 1997, she obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From 2005 to 2019, she managed the AŽ Gallery in Zagreb. She received mul-tiple awards for her work, and her works are part of prominent museum collections in Croatia. She lives and works in Zagreb.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Image: from the National Museum of Modern Art's archives