* Opening: Thursday, 3 July 2025 at 7:00 PM *
Possibilities for '25 is a long-term collaborative project connecting the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb, initiated by MSU curator Leila Topić. The project continues the curatorial vision of former museum director Davor Matičević, the founder of the famous Possibilities for '71, which in the early 1970s promoted then-young artists such as Sanja Iveković, Dalibor Martinis, Boris Bućan and Jagoda Kaloper. Possibilities for '25 presents recent projects by students and recent alumni of the Academy, who continue to explore art through experimental, critical and process-based approaches rooted in current social and technological contexts.
This year's selected artist is Leonardo Losciale, a visual artist and musician whose work consistently engages with the dynamics between power and powerlessness, action and inaction, form and void. His exhibition Sisto Re brings together works developed over the course of the multi-year cycle Between, including sculptures, ambient installations, and spatial artefacts. The point of departure for his artistic and theoretical research lies in philosophical concepts such as dynamis and adynamis, the state of exception, and relational aesthetics, which he transforms into tactile, sonic, and mechanical forms that do not seek representation, but relation.
At the center of the exhibition stands the monumental figure Sisto Re, made of raw clay and constructed as an unstable, hollow body – a “king” who stands despite already having collapsed. Here, Losciale evokes the figure of homo sacer, a central notion in Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, describing a being excluded from the law, deprived of citizenship, yet subjected to sovereign power. This figure, vulnerable and empty, endures precisely through its persistence. It does not act, but contemplates. It does not rule, but suffers. And yet, it is not passive: its silence and the unfulfilled gesture are forms of articulating presence in the world.
Losciale rejects the idea of art as production and instead develops a practice of “active reduction” – micro-gestures that negate the logic of performance, spectacle, and institutional representation. Mobile sculptures made of balloons, pumps, fans and raw materials react to air, gravity, and the viewer’s presence. The artistic object does not exist without relation; it is the audience who (un)completes it, who resonates within its tension.
In a time when everything is subordinated to efficiency and productivity, Sisto Re invites us to pause, to listen to emptiness, to engage with an aesthetic of non-doing. The artistic space here becomes one of restraint, tension, and uncertainty – a space for imagining, without the need for fulfilment.
Who is Leonardo Losciale?
Leonardo Losciale (born in 1985, Italy) is a visual artist and musician. He graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb, in 2024. His artistic work encompasses sculpture, ambient installation, video, performative objects, and experimental sound practices. He engages with philosophical and political themes such as potential (dynamis), the state of exception, relational aestheticism, and the boundaries of form, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Carl Schmitt.
He has exhibited widely in Croatia, including at the Salon of Youth and the Croatian Sculpture Triennial (Meštrović Pavilion), and has held solo exhibitions at Galerija Šira, Galerija SC, Garaža Kamba, the Augustinčić Gallery, and the Diocletian’s Cellars in Split. He has taken part in international sculpture workshops in Vrsar and Brtonigla, as well as numerous workshops focused on collective practices and artistic interventions in public space (Graz, Ljubljana, Trieste, Zagreb).
Alongside his visual art practice, he is also active as a classical musician – a timpanist with the Zagreb Philharmonic and an award-winning soloist. His practice synthesizes sound, the body, space, and theory, wherein sculpture becomes an instrument and emptiness a material of articulation.
He lives and works in Zagreb.
Part of the Possibilities for '25 project
Leonardo Losciale: Sisto Re
Museum of Contemporary Art, Black Box, 3 July - 31 August 2025
