Biography
Nina Butorac is a socially engaged & climate artist. In her artistic activity, she re-examines her responsibilities towards social and environmental events that surround her, with a current interest in the possibilities of overlapping individual and collective experiences.
Butorac has undertaken residencies in Finland, Rauma (2014), where she created a participatory installation of herbs in collaboration with elementary school children. In 2016, she participated in the Art Research Lab Ars Kozara in BIH with the conceptual land art installation „A Moment Now.” She collaborated with Australian artist Gail Hocking, exhibiting a project called Erosions of Future Memories, in Adelaide, FeltSpace gallery, and at the CEKAO gallery in Zagreb in 2022.
“My art practice comes from inviting participation and rediscovering ways of living (not just surviving) in a time characterized by political, economic, and climate crises, including the destruction and extinction of the world as we know it. Deliberated through the social and political prism, my works are aimed at the void left by incompetent and corrupt authorities.”
“The medium of performance, eat-art & prose poetry, which I use in my work, has a lively, activist, revolutionary momentum, the momentum of transferring the mimetic changes in mentality. This energy is a trigger with which I decode the space and the visitor, since the audience – particularly the accidental one – is the seed of reality that processes the artistic act, thereby growing together with the artist.”
Education and awards
Education
2005-2012; Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb, 2013; Faculty of Philosophy, Osijek, pedagogy and didactics degree
Awards (2024.)
Winner of the G w a e r t l e r grant for the multimedia, socially engaged research project on mental health and assertiveness among young people; Moving Horizons-Mental State of Time
Socially engaged performances and projects
2024. Group exhibition The Visible Ones, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb/Gallery of Art in Split, collaborative performance with artist selma banich “Caressing”
2023. CEKAO Gallery, in collaboration with artist Gail Hocking, Erosions of Future Memories; Rivers in Us, Rivers Around Us
2023. Blurred in their non-existence, the public actions of collecting statements, eat-art actions, and wrapping monuments Zagreb, Cvjetni Square, 2023.
2023. The night of Performance by Domino, Zagreb, AKC Medika, Her unstitched silence
2022. Gallery Događanja, Zagreb: A Reverse Line Game, exhibition and performance
2022. Prozori Gallery, Zagreb: Pacify of Shivers, exhibition and participatory performance
2019. Summer at Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb event, participatory performance: Eaten Home
2019. Festival of Firsts: The Right to an Apartment and Housing Policy, an installation with mirrors and a video work The probability of effort .
2018. Festival of Firsts: The Age of Emptiness, Events Gallery, Edible/Sound Installation in gallery space, and Performance: Emptiness of Home
2018. Perforations Rijeka, Club Filodramatica, performance piece: Behind the Red
Performance art festival OPTIMISM, Osijek, Kazamat Gallery; Behind the Red
2018. International competition: Social Art Award, commendation of the commission for the work Blind spot Adaptation
Group exhibitions/projects
2023-2024. Drava Art Biennale, Erosions of future memories; Rivers in us-rivers around us, video and installation piece “Erosions of future memories; to accept the new means to enter the fight”
International group exhibition How to Look at Nature: Art and Capital, Zagreb, HDLU
2021. Adelaide, Australia, FeltSpace gallery, group international exhibition, collaboration with artist Gail Hocking; Erosions of future memories