Vlasta Žanić
Bare, 2002
video-performance, MP4 3' 25''
MG-6841e

The video performance “Bare” belongs, as the artist herself emphasizes, to a series of “expressive performances (Closing, Bare, Distancing...) that carried a strong emotional charge and the need to express myself immediately. Sculpture did not provide me with the opportunity to express myself. It was slow, static, and not direct enough. Although it actually took me quite some time and cour-age to dare to stage my first performance, the transition from sculpture to a completely new and different medium was a great revolution for me at that time.” In “Bare,” Žanić enhances her face by plucking her eyebrows. The close-up shot of a static camera follows this ritual of beautification in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they are observing the scene from the position of a mirror that supposedly reflects the artist. The performance is accompanied by a musical background: an indis-tinct Latin love song composed of clichés about romantic love, acoustic guitar, celebration of female beauty, the inevitability of love's farewell, promises of an imminent reunion, etc. It is interesting to compare Vlasta Žanić’s performance with Sanja Iveković’s video work “Make-up, Make-down” from 1978, also part of the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art. Both videos question the relationship between women, beauty, and (male) desire, but each does so in a different and almost diametrically opposed way. While Sanja Iveković’s video generally follows the aesthetics of high production television, thus more directly addressing the social or patriarchal determination of women, “Bare,” in line with the production possibilities of its time, expresses a certain aesthetics of home video, thus moving more into the sphere of private rather than social experience. This differ-ence is also contributed to, of course, by the absence of the artist’s face in Sanja Iveković’s video, whereas it is centrally positioned in Vlasta Žanić’s video. The “poor” lighting of the face, its continu-ous approach and retreat from the camera, as well as the artist’s constant gaze into it, create a certain impression of excessive closeness between the artist and the viewer and further define the artist’s understanding of performance as an expressive act.
Vasta Žanić obtained a degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1990, where she has been teaching as a professor since 2018. With a group of artists, she represented Croatia at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and has staged numerous exhibitions in Zagreb, Split, Buenos Aires, Graz, New York, Düsseldorf, and Prague.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Still image from the video - from the National Museum of Modern Art's Archives