The Museum of Contemporary Art has the pleasure of inviting you to the presentation of Kata Mijatović's VR installation Field on Tuesday, 12 March, at 7 p.m., at the Black Box.
The point of departure of the interactive VR installation Field is to provide visibility for the phenomenon of creating/constructing worlds in the unconscious mind, to visualise the "togetherness in dreaming" that is one of the key features of the Dream Archive. Dreams, which are the products of biovirtual reality that is created unconsciously in our mind, are in the Field paradoxically placed in a field of technically produced virtual reality created by the conscious mind.
The setting that defines the VR space is a muddy ploughed field on a rainy autumn morning, above which panels/billboards float all the way to the horizon. Printed on the panels are selected texts from two hundred and fifty dreams from the Archive, which the visitor can read while walking in the field. Movement inside the Field is enabled by a transparent umbrella, an actual object that the visitor takes before entering the Field. Inside the Field, the umbrella "protects from the rain" and guides the visitor's movement in the desired direction.
The merging of sensory information that comes at the same time from real and virtual reality also includes a physical experience that takes the body on a journey through different dimensions at the same time (real, virtual, conscious, unconscious). The confusing feeling of being in a "re-created" virtual world of dreams (double virtuality) is enhanced by the fact that the only things that come from reality in that virtual environment are the texts from the dreams in the Archive and the umbrella.
From the very beginning, Kata Mijatović has continuously explored the relationship between the conscious rational self and the realm of the unconscious. The dream as a phenomenon and evidence of unconscious personal processes that occur without the possibility of us controlling them, cancelling them or bringing them back, appears in her first works from the end of the nineties. Further work with dreams resulted in 2013 in the online project Dream Archive (www.arhivsnova.hr), an interactive online domain that collects and archives textual records of dreams, and was the central work of the exhibition project Between Heaven and Earth at the 55th Venice Biennale. So far, more than two thousand three hundred dreams in different languages have been received in the Archive. Thanks to the global response in the immaterial space of the Internet, this has resulted in the creation of a kind of dream pool, in which numerous introspective and hermetic records of dreams in the context of the Archive evidence the ability of the human mind to unconsciously create images of worlds outside the control of the conscious self.
"No matter how intimate the dreams are at first glance or concern subjective hermetic worlds, they comment from an unconscious level on the shared age we live in, focusing on our social existence in today's hypnagogic atmosphere of manipulated reality which, due to the virtual worlds in which we spend more and more time, takes on a whole new meaning. The unconscious reacts to these changes faster and more truthfully than the conscious self, which, immersed in the culture of conforming to the found order, lives in oblivion of the realm of the unconscious." (Kata Mijatović)
The interactive VR installation Field was realised in 2018 as part of the MARTA art project (Mixed Reality Kunst im öffetlichen Raum) at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf (Hochschule Düsseldorf, Faculty of Media).
Curator and coordinator of the Field project: Ivana Druzetić
Production: LAVAlabs Moving Images
VR Programming & 3D Design: Alexander Giesbrecht
Technical advisor: Marco Strobel
Sound: Katharina Bär
Curator/MSU: Martina Munivrana
Kata Mijatović (Branjina, 1956) graduated in law in 1981 from the Faculty of Law in Osijek. From 1988 to 1991, she was a member of the artistic group Močvara in Beli Manastir. She enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1991, and graduated from the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From 2005 to 2019, she was the head of the AŽ Gallery in Zagreb. From 2017, she was a member of the artistic group PLEH. She represented Croatia in 2013 at the 55th Venice Biennale (curated by Branko Francheschi). She has been awarded for her work, and her works are in the collections of several Croatian museums. She lives and works in Zagreb.
The exhibition was realised with the funds of the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.
