Political Speech is Suprematism

Slought is pleased to announce "Political Speech is Suprematism," an architectural exhibition about the changing history of the Meštrović pavilion in Zagreb, Croatia, and the cultural practices that it has inspired. The exhibition will be on display in the Slought Foundation galleries from September 19 through November 6, 2009. Branko Franceschi, Director of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HDLU) and curator of the exhibition, will deliver a lecture on the featured artists and architects on Saturday, September 19th at 6:30pm in conjunction with the exhibition opening. Franceschi will be joined in Philadelphia by featured artists Zoran Pavelic and Josip Zanki, due to the generous support of The Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Designed in 1934 by the late sculptor Ivan Meštrović, the Meštrović pavilion in downtown Zagreb is famous for its singular grandeur and its glass dome. Since its construction, it has become a sort of palimpsest for political agendas, many of them totalitarian. The pavilion was first transformed from an exhibition hall into a mosque, and then into a museum of the revolution. Most recently, after the war of the 1990s had ended, the Meštrović pavilion was turned back into an exhibition hall and placed in the care of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists, its original owners. Since then it has become one of the prestigious contemporary exhibition spaces in Croatia, known for the site specific art works inspired by the architecture's unique form. The title of the exhibition is taken from one of these practices, a public space intervention by the visual artist Zoran Pavelić (1999).

Through its many transformations, the architecture of the pavilion has come to register the complex political aspirations that have swept the region throughout the twentieth century. This political tumult has been reflected and materialized in the very syntax of the pavilion's architecture, but also the many artworks presented in the pavilion in recent years that have sought to explore its complicated history. In presenting a survey of these artworks at Slought Foundation, the exhibition highlights the pavilion's symbolic power and explores how a physical structure can captivate the imagination. The result is a unique blend of forms, a trespassing of the usual boundaries between architecture and the visual arts.