Exibition “Gosti u grlu” by Nikolina Butorac

Nikolina Butorac (b. 1986, Zagreb), after receiving her degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Animation and New Media, New Media major (2012), she undertook an artist residency in Rauma, Finland (2014), where she created a participatory plant installation in collaboration with elementary school children. She participated in the Art Research Lab Ars Kozara in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the conceptual Land art installation A Moment Now (2016), and collaborated with Australian artist Gail Hocking on the project Erosion of a Future Memory, exhibited in Adelaide (Australia) in the FeltSpace Gallery and in the CEKAO gallery in Zagreb (2022). Using elements of socially engaged art, Butorac creates oases of equal interaction, where differences complement and enrich one another. She emphasizes including both selected and incidental audiences, exploring the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the physical and the ephemeral, the mobile and the fixed.

Nikolina Butorac’s exhibition Guests in the Throat presents women from different parts of the world, who, through their activism or simply through the way they live, have worked to protect the soil from systematic exploitation and the incursions of the capitalism regime. At the same time, these women are defenders of natural and biodiverse environments, striving to give voice to smaller local communities wishing to preserve their cultural, historical and traditional values. Aware that the land/soil is not merely a resource or background, but an ecosystem on which human, animal and plant life depend, these activists have fought not only for human rights, but also for the life of the Earth as a whole, at the cost of losing their own lives. The choice of women as the central protagonists of this spatial installation is not accidental. In many fertility-based religions, the sacredness of women is closely linked to the idea of the land/soil as a feminine principle, with the Earth itself appearing as Mother – an eternal, unchanging and creative force from which all life emerges and to which everything ultimately returns.

For her spatial artistic installation, Nikolina Butorac has chosen women, activists and environmental defenders, whose actions promote the idea of the interconnectedness of the Earth and all living beings. Through their own artistic expression, they convey the principles of ecofeminism, understanding the roots of the oppression of women, nature, Third World countries, unprivileged social groups, and various Others in the developmental and the destructive power of capitalism, driven by a patriarchal system of thought and hierarchical binary divisions.

IMPRESUM

Author: Nikolina Butorac

Curator: Željka Petrović Osmak

Exhibition design: Nikolina Butorac

Visual: Nikolina Butorac

Graphic design: Nikolina Butorac, Ivan Drobina

Translation: Ana Domazet

Educational programs: Nikolina Butorac, Anastazija Petrović, Silvia Vrsalović

Marketing and public relations: Ivana Lušić

Technical realization: Davor Filipović, Darijen Paša

Publisher: Ethnographic Museum

For the publisher: PhD Zvjezdana Antoš

Print: Team Print

Edition: 100

The exhibition is part of the museum´s exhibition project Earth/soil

The exhibition was financed by the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb