The Art of Dreams: Kata Mijatović Represents Croatia at the Venice Biennale

Representing Croatia at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Kata Mijatović brings the unconscious into the conscious realm with a work that is built from an online archive of dreams. Already active, the archive is set as a Facebook profile, Arhiv Snova – Dream Archive (with an accompanying multi-disciplinary website www.arhivsnova.hr), where individuals are prompted to share their dreams through words and images. The profile has become a global pool of dreams that come in many different formats and has created a platform of dialogue for all involved. The project brings forth to the public arena what is essentially a very private and individualistic experience. The archive asks questions about why people dream, what is the function of the unconscious in the construction of reality, and how people express dreams; the questions are challenging to answer as dreams are inherently difficult to put into words. These questions aim to address the role of dreams in contemporary society and as the curator Branko Franceschi notes ‘While ancient civilisations included the psychological energies behind the conscious self (or the rational) in their understanding of the world – our civilisation sees the space of the unconscious solely as a space for repression.’ The artwork explores the gap between the content and the power of our personal dreams against that image of reality from our conscious world. Watch a video of one of Kata Mijatović’s installations below: Between the Sky and the Earth is a social sculpture built through the combination of archiving, remembering and recreating the artist’s and other people’s dreams, and will be realised through a range of mediums including texts, images, and interactive forms. The end result will unite these elements in a single work of projection and performance, which will visualise the polarity of the private dream world and the public ‘real’ world. The Dream Archive will take the form of an iron cage, suspended mid-air, that will invite visitors into a dialogue about the unconscious, subconscious, conscious and the real. Alongside it Kata Mijatovic will present a number of other artworks via monitors that are based around the subject of dreams and will enclose the central installation. Mijatovic’s use of online forums follows a trend recently seen in the Croatian Pavilion of pushing the boundaries of art media. The 2011 Venice Biennale saw Antonio G. Lauer (A.K.A. Tomislav Gotovac) collaborate with the theatre collective BADco, which similarly broke the norms of art installation. The project was titled One Needs to Live Self-Confidently… Watching, and it scrutinised the rules of spectating and the politics of attention. Playing with the ways in which audiences interact with art and theatre, the project used the presence and absence of performers to interrogate methods of engagement. Cameras linked to delayed live-feed projections transformed viewers into actors in this captivating display. Mijatovic’s use of online participation can be seen as following a similar train of thought, as it allows the public to be as much a creator of the work as her herself. To be involved with Mijatovic’s project please visit the Arhiv Snova – Dream Archive Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ArhivSnova