* Opening: June 11 at 8 pm *
On screen, everything has become equally urgent and equally disposable. Nothing shocks. Nothing settles. Nothing lingers long enough to feel real. We are overstimulated, but underwhelmed.
This year’s edition of Organ Vida, titled Happy Spiraling, seeks to find meaning in an everyday life saturated with images. We are interested in how contemporary visual culture reflects reality, but also how it actively produces it: how it shapes the ways we see and understand the world and how we make art. The featured works engage with an overstimulated digital world in different ways - whether by exposing how it manipulates and exhausts us, by destabilizing it through subversion, by gaming it, mocking it, or escaping from it altogether.
More about the exhibitions:
The works of the eleven finalists of the group exhibition Happy Spiraling explore themes of identity and identification, representation, online life, autofiction as an artistic practice, surveillance, control, the production of nonsense and fake news, and escapism as important affective dimensions of online life. The exhibition features works by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Madeleine Andersson, Aurélie Bayad, Maja Bojanić & Brin Žvan, Hiiona Choi, Jame St Findlay, Hertta Kiiski, Irma Name, Rafael Roncato, and Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė.
Lure, a major solo presentation by French artist Julie Béna, is the central exhibition of the 14th festival edition. For more than two decades, Julie Béna has been building a world inhabited by an ever-expanding ensemble of eccentric, unsettling, and comic characters. Jesters, doppelgängers, human and nonhuman, spectral and at times monstrous figures move between films, performances, sculptures, and installations. For Organ Vida, she presents a traveling circus spectacle anchored by a tent-like structure - a site-specific installation conceived for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. In collaboration with the Dutch organization FOTODOK, we present Ocho Día. Eight Days, Nine Nights, a new solo exhibition by Kevin Osepa curated by Daria Tuminas. Drawing on rituals from his native Curaçao that are gradually disappearing from collective memory, Osepa’s work explores loss and transformation through decolonial and queer frameworks.
The solo exhibition A Home with No Roof by Swiss artist Sara De Brito Faustino comprises a site-specific installation and a series of photographs. Reconstructing her childhood home as a miniature world, the artist transforms personal trauma into a visual narrative that balances between the tender and the monstrous, offering a new perspective on the dysfunctional family space. Paula Tončić is the recipient of the Marina Viculin Award 2025/2026, a distinction awarded biennially since 2017 to artists whose practice is rooted in the photographic medium. The award includes a mentorship programme as well as support for the production of new work and a solo presentation. Tončić’s exhibition COCCYX CUTZ draws on the hypnotic atmosphere of casinos, flashing reward systems, and the seductive logic of addiction, tension, and surrender.
Curators: Barbara Gregov, Lovro Japundžić, Lea Vene
International jury of the exhibition Happy Spiraling: Thomas Conchou, Morana Matković,
Natálie Kubíková, Daria Tuminas and Organ Vida
Curator of the exhibition Ocho Día. Eight Days, Nine Nights: Daria Tuminas
Associate curators: Morana Matković, Ana Škegro
Producer: Franka Bihar
Exhibition design: Marin Berović, Ana Lisonek
Technical support: Neža Knez, Marin Kovačević, Igor Lukić, Renato Mihaljenović Aleksandar
Milošević, Filip Pacak, Ivan Tudek, Maxime Weinmann, Filip Zima, Domagoj Žuna
Design: Alma Šavar
Public Relations: Inesa Antić
Web and text editor: Sara Gurdulić
Translation: Tihana Bertek
Proofreading: Mak Maslać
Photographer: Ive Trojanović
The festival’s main partner is the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (MSU), while its partners are FOTODOK and the SKD Prosvjeta Gallery.
The festival is supported by: City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb, Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Zagreb Tourist Board, Kultura Nova Foundation, Mondriaan Fund for Visual Arts and Cultural Heritage, and Cross-Looking, co-funded by the European Union.
