The members of the Group of Six Artists hailed from various artistic fields: experimental film and art (Mladen Stilinović), poetry (Vlado Martek), photography (Željko Jerman, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović), and painting (Boris Demur). The group's collective activity was characterized by active public interventions (exhibition-actions), criticism, and the dematerialization or materialization of the artwork and its media (photography, film, drawing, text, magazines as artistic work, artists' books). Furthermore, their activity was marked by cultural activism as a means of provoking the private and public spheres, gallery and non-gallery work, and the political, aesthetic, artistic, and ethical values of late socialism in Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Eastern Europe. Their work was, both contemporarily and interpretively, associated with various individuals, movements, and groups: Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, the Group of Six Artists from Belgrade's SKC, Goran Đorđević, the Bosch+Bosch Group (Balint Sombathy, Katalin Ladik), Group 143, and later with the Slovenian NSK movement, the Sarajevo group Zvono, and others.
The intention of the organizers of the international symposium MAJ 75 is to mark half a century since the beginning of the activity of the Group of Six Artists, as well as to open new and different interpretative readings of their work and the changes in the ways of understanding conceptual, post-conceptual, and contemporary domestic, regional, and international art. On June 11 and 12, a series of lectures, panels, and guided tours will take place in the Gorgona Hall, in the exhibition spaces of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and during a themed walk through downtown Zagreb. These events will focus on exhibition-actions, the transhistoricity and internationalism of conceptual poetry and its expanded field, conceptual photography, art collectives and their activities in public space from the 1970s to the present day, the politics of friendship and comradeship, emotional conceptualism and popular culture, poetry and performance, as well as the international reception and impact of the Group of Six Authors.
Participants:
Adair Rounthwaite, Miodrag Šuvaković, Klara Kemp Welch, Vlado Martek, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović, Branka Stipančić, Sandra Križić Roban, Tevž Logar, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Alessio Fransoni, Luka Savić, Ana Frangovska, Daniel Grün, Emese Kurti, Dubravka Đurić, Suzana Marjanić, Branislav Jakovljević, Darko Šimičić, Ivana Meštrov, Luka Bogdanić, Janka Vukmir, Kate Sutton, Neva Lukić
Schedule
Wednesday, 11th June 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Gorgona Hall
10:00-10:05
Vesna Meštrić, MSU Zagreb director
Introduction
10:05-11:00
Adair Rounthwaite, Division of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle
Band on the Run. Authorship in the Work of the Group of Six Artists
11:00 – 12:30
Photographic Image and Memory
Moderated by Ivana Meštrov
Branka Stipančić
Exhibitions - actions of the Group of Six Artists in the photographs of Mladen and Sven Stilinović
Sandra Križić Roban, Institute of Art History, Zagreb
Realistic, Documentary, Truthful, Manipulative – The Multiplicity of Conceptual Photography
Tevž Logar
The Most Honest Image Is The One That Refuses To Stay Still
13:30 -15:00
Politics of Friendship
Moderated by Luka Bogdanić
Zdenka Badovinac
Comradeship
Ivana Bago, Berlin University of the Arts - UdK Berlin
„Urban-naive art“: the Group of Six Artists and the third line of Yugoslav art
Alessio Fransoni
The Ufficio per l’Immaginazione Preventiva (Office for Preventive Imagination, Rome, 1973) and the Group of Six Artists: a comparative analysis
15:00 – 16:30
Exhibition actions and their protagonists: Vlado Martek, Sven Stilinović and Fedor Vučemilović in conversation with Janka Vukmir
17:00 – 17:30
Guided visit to the Comradeship section of Collection as a Verb exhibition
18:00-19:00
Klara Kemp-Welch, Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of LondonŽ
Smile! Conceptualism with a Human Face
Thursday, 12th June 2025
10:00 – 11:00
Miško Šuvaković, Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade
Through the City: Groups in the Art of the Seventies
11:00 – 12:30
Collectives and Working Together: Histories of the Political Geographies of Art
Moderated by Kate Sutton
Dubravka Đurić, Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade
Transnational Notion of Conceptual Poetry
Daniel Grúň, Július Koller Society
The Animal in a Cage. Artist, Audience, and the Patrimony of the Nation-State
Luka Savić
Who Needs Institutions?
Redistribution of Cultural Capital – OHO and Vlado Martek
Ana Frangovska, National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia
Echoes of the Group of Six Artists on the Macedonian Visual Scene: Actions, Transdisciplinarity, Anti-Art, Documentation; Parallel Historical Reflections and Post-Conceptual Resonances
13:30 – 15:00
Poetry and Action
Moderated by Neva Lukić
Darko Šimičić, Tomislav Gotovac Institute
Magazine-catalogue MAJ 75: exhibitions-actions by other means
Emese Kürti, Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI)
Collective as Utopia. The Ambivalences of Artistic Collaboration in the Bosch+Bosch Group
Branislav Jakovljević, Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
No Language Model: Vlado Martek's Object Poetr
Suzana Marjanić, The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
The banner THIS IS OUR WORLD by Bojan Koštić as a paraphrase of the action-banner by Željko Jerman THIS IS NOT MY WORLD or of the hammer and axe
17:30 – 19:00
Exhibitions-actions on Trg Republike and Jezuitski trg, a guided walk by Ivana Meštrov
Organisation: Jasna Jakšić, Darko Šimičić, Nikola Devčić
Research Advisor: Miško Šuvaković
Assistants: Laura Bui, Petra Cegur
The symposium is organized with the support of the City of Zagreb, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, and the Zagreb Tourist Board.
Maj 75: An international symposium on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first exhibition-action by the Group of Six Artists
11th and 12th of June 2025
MSU, Zagreb Gorgona Hall
