Organ Vida 2024

Organ Vida has been a leading Croatian institution promoting and researching contemporary expanded photography practices in Croatia and internationally since its establishment in 2008.

Overview

This year, Organ Vida is all about odd disobediences. Micro-rebellions, gut reactions, instincts, intense yearnings and bizarre obsessions — the weirdly visceral.

At the end of 2022, when 'goblin mode' overwhelmingly triumphed in Oxford Dictionary’s selection of the word of the year, we wondered what would follow: would it stand for an empty gesture that normalizes self-indulgent and defeatist behavior, or could it rather come to represent a punkish disobedience – aestheticized, but still politically charged articulation of dissatisfaction?

The term went viral that same year, playing a key role in the fake news account of a celebrity breakup involving rapper Kanye West (now known as Ye) and soon-to-be fashion icon Julia Fox. While post-breakup Ye kept lingering in his now-signature 'dark mode' behavior, Fox's newly adopted goblin state led her to embody a distinctive expression of discontent, to become the face of a fresh take on contemporary beauty—the latest iteration of the aesthetics of ugliness.

The ugly seemed to have seeped into every pore of visual culture. The messy, raw, and the hideous slowly pushed out sleek looks and polished images. BeReal’s ‘genuine glimpses’ seriously threatened the reign of the Instagram face. The weirdos took center stage. We embraced smudges. Dirt. Alien vibes. Welcomed ugly ducklings. Killjoys. Chaos. Everything macabre. Opened doors to 'bad beauties’, 'trashy girls’ and ‘creepy cuties’. 'Feral girl summers' and 'anarchist femme baking'. All the strangely defiant micro-trends. The Y2K, in general. Goblin mode came to represent a somewhat grotesque, yet poignant rejection of perfectionism, both in relation to bodies and visual culture. It emerged as a way of seeing, but also as a mode of being — an unfiltered response to spiritual nihilism triggered by the current state of global affairs, by the imminence of the world falling apart, evidently much sooner than we expected.

The opening night will be marked by 2 performances of the festival finalists – the interdisciplinary artist Teo Ala-Ruona will present frenetic and emotionally charged Anabolic Spectacle, while the artists Annemarija Gulbe, Anna Ansone, Krišjānis Elviks will perform plafull and self-ironical THIRST.

The festival program includes solo shows by artists Ivan Buvinič, Zoe Williams. In addition the group show Creeps and Butterflies will exhibit photographers such as Teo Ala-Ruona, Hugo Laporte, Clémence Elman, Julie Folly, Valerie Geissbühler, Annemarija Gulbe u suradnji s Annom Ansone i Krišjānis Elviksom, Zhao Qian, Stacy Kranitz, Marianna Nardini, Mila Soporowska. Plus, the group exhibition Ties That Bind features FUTURES artists Dev Dhunsi, Sasha Chaika, Jan Durina, Ihar Hancharuk, Donja Nasseri, Angyvir Padilla and Sheung Yiu.