Vlasta Delimar

The exhibition would present 40 years of creative work of Vlasta Delimar (b. 1956, Zagreb, Croatia), one of the most significant performance and multimedia artists from the Balkans, who left an indelible mark on the evolution of visual culture and body politics in Central Europe.

Vlasta Delimar started her career in the late 1970s when the post-conceptualist scene in Yugoslavia was at full intensity. Being fiercely independent from the very beginning, she rejected formal education as inadequate, conservative and outdated, and broke with traditional principles of artwork development. Instead, she focused on ambiental performances, actions, happenings and photo collages where she used her naked body as the primary medium of her work.

Delimar has finely defined her position as a distinguished, autonomous artist with no predecessors nor successors. Although the artist has manifestly dissociated herself from affiliation with any kind of framework, there were many attempts to position her within established art-historical and theoretical practices. General public associated her oeuvre with radical feminist art practices while art critique often compared it with the works of Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Barbara Hammer, Faith Wilding, Martha Rosler, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Beth Edelson, etc. In the art history glossaries, the name of Vlasta Delimar is connected to the terms such as Postfeminist Art, Neoconceptual Art, Abject, Transgression, Eroticized Women’s Subject, Heterosexual Identity, Private Symbol, Ironic and parodical forms of behaviour, etc.

It is important to say that Delimar was continuously refusing to identify or affiliate herself with any classification, insisting, by her own words, on “universal art” which overcomes especially antagonistic positions of gender binarism and feminist reaction to it, that is very much defining our zeitgeist. Her methods, which always involve private symbols,point out to supremacy of the unique world of the artist over any kind of cultural metatheory, style, or ethical system.

While respecting Delimar’s fiercely independent position within art history, the authors of this exhibition are trying to raise a question - how much does the artist’s work bring us back to the very origins of feminist thought which still exist within Eco-feminism. In the world shaken by ecological catastrophes caused by greed and neglect, this theoretical field and movement seem more relevant now than ever before. From its beginnings, feminism was concerned with the relation between woman and nature as this relation was understood as an origin of male oppression over female. Therefore, feminism was fighting a battle to deconstruct this relation and destroy gender stereotypes. With the emergence of eco-feminism, the relation of women and nature is perceived in a different way. In the heart of the eco-feministic agenda is the premise that in contemporary neoliberal transcultural patriarchal systems, women and nature are reduced to controlled and exploited objects. Thus, eco-feminists conclude that the key responsibility of women is to keep the planet healthy, care for the survival of man and nature, and to preserve humanist values.