Organ Vida Festival Opens in Zagreb with Five Exhibitions

Zagreb's Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU) will transform into a vibrant hub of artistic expression with the opening of the 14th Organ Vida International Festival on June 11. The festival launches with five distinct exhibitions, centering around the theme "Happy Spiralling / Sretno u vrtlogu." This central group exhibition features the work of eleven finalists who have interpreted the theme through their artistic lenses.

Alongside the group show, four solo exhibitions will debut. These include works by Kevin Osepe, Sara De Brito Faustino, and Paula Tončić, the recipient of this year's Marina Viculin Award. The main solo exhibition is dedicated to Julie Béna, marking her first exhibition in Croatia. All exhibitions will remain accessible to the public until September 6, 2026.

Julie Béna's artistic practice spans over two decades, creating a world populated by eccentric, unsettling, and often comical characters. Her work, which draws inspiration from her childhood with a traveling theater troupe, delves into themes of mobility, collective creation, and temporary belonging. For Organ Vida, Béna presents "LURE," a traveling circus spectacle designed as a site-specific installation for the MSU. The circus motif serves as a narrative framework, revealing bizarre twists, transformations, and hidden structures within the performance.

Béna's installations often expose the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of illusion and performance. Her characteristic black metal sculptures and meticulously executed illusionistic drawings will be on display. The exhibition extends into less-explored corners of the museum, revealing court jesters and anonymous provocateurs, recurring motifs in Béna's films and installations. She uses exaggeration, theatricality, and even "bad taste" to critique social norms and the desires, traumas, and pleasures they shape.

The finalists' exhibition explores the overwhelming nature of contemporary life, saturated with images and digital stimuli that struggle to evoke genuine emotion. Through themes of identity, representation, online existence, surveillance, control, and the proliferation of fake news, these artists dissect the mechanisms of the digital world. They highlight how this environment manipulates, exhausts, and entertains, while simultaneously attempting to destabilize it through humor, subversion, irony, and escapism.