The foundation for Kata Mijatović’s exhibition No Waking Up lies in the many years the author has spent exploring the phenomena of dreams and dreaming – more precisely, thematizing and researching the relationship between our rational self, which shapes all spheres of human action and life and, on the other hand, the large and unexplored area of the unconscious that redefines the constructed images of our reality.
One of the artist’s main research works is the Dream Archive founded in 2013 as an interactive online platform onto which over two thousand textual records of dreams from all over the world and in different languages have been entered to this date. Symbolically stored in the domain of immaterial virtual reality, this particular base for the accumulation and release of the unconscious, manifested through sleep, does not only bring individually told and transmitted introspective contents but above all functions as a space of universal narrative and collective experience regarding the existence of internal creative mental forces that are beyond the control of the conscious. In keeping with her interest in the phenomenon of the unconscious in respect to its potentials to sharpen the perception of reality itself, or the ability to open the field of subtle subversions and, as she states, resistance to the negotiated image of the world, Mijatović introduces the poetics of dreams as a conceptual expression in the reflections on the dominant “oversized rational constructions we live daily” but also the paradox of today’s time, often on the verge of hypnagogic states and the astonishing. The author uses her own dreams, those collected through archives or in other ways, as a pretext and constructive material for a number of works she performs in mixed media, ranging from interactive and site-specific installations, performances and videos, to objects and audio forms. In a wide range of inscriptions of personal, intimate, enigmatic, traumatic, socially connoting, selected dream contents in the artist’s works, function as a specific type of problem articulation of processes, mechanisms, norms, laws, contexts in which our human and social existences take place.
Kata Mijatović (Branjina, 1956) graduated from the Faculty of Law in Osijek in 1982, and the beginning of her artistic activity was marked by her work in the art group Močvara in the Baranja area, in the late eighties and early nineties. She began her painting studies in 1991 at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, then continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1993, where she graduated four years later. Since 1997, she has been actively exhibiting and realizing a series of solo exhibitions and projects, participating in numerous group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. In the period from 2005 to 2019, she was the program director at the AŽ Gallery of the artistic organization Atelieri Žitnjak in Zagreb. Also, from 2005 to 2010, she participated in the organization of the Baranja Art Colony. In 2013, Kata Mijatović represented Croatia at the 55th Venice Biennale with the project Between Heaven and Earth (curator Branko Franceschi). She has been a member of the PLEH art group since 2007. She lives and works in Zagreb.
Curator: Miroslav Karić