Ana Hušman: Arboretums, Rainforests and Aunt Lidia's Notebooks

The AŽ Gallery invites you to the opening of Ana Hušman's exhibition "Arboretums, Rainforests and Aunt Lidia's Notebooks" on October 16, 2026 at 7 p.m. The exhibition will remain open until November 8, 2026.

We invite you to the opening of Ana Hušman's exhibition "Arboretums, Rainforests and Aunt Lidia's Notebooks", which will be held on October 16 at 7 pm in the AŽ Gallery.
The exhibition is open until November 8, 2026.

"Forest cyclamen – forest cyclamen is mostly used in the form of a dry powder for: bowel cleansing and treatment of severe headaches – 'migraines', nasal polyps, old smelly wounds and ulcers", we read in one of the guidelines for the use of plants for potentially medicinal purposes. The instruction is not found in a medical or herbal-pharmacy magazine, but in the notebook of Ana's aunt Lidija. There are several of Lidia's notebooks, and each deals with a specific topic – from recipes to growing plants and everyday observations. All of them are characterized by exceptional systematicity and almost catalogual character.
After Lidia's death, the notebooks were inherited by her niece, the artist Ana Hušman. With the exhibition "Arboretums, Rainforests and Aunt Lidia's Notebooks", Ana enters into a dialogue with her late aunt, whose character becomes the protagonist and carrier of the narrative that opens up to us in layers.
Ana continues in the footsteps of Lidia's notebooks, collecting plants and leaves of various trees that she reads about in her aunt's notebooks and from which she makes papers. These papers will one day become the prelude to an art book in which the artist's personal experiences, quotes from Lidia's notebooks and memories of Lidija will be intertwined with the events that accompanied Ana's exploration of the plant world. There is a lot of paper because there were many plants that needed to be explored. Of different shades of beige, depending on the plant from which they were made, the papers are exhibited on the wall of the AŽ Gallery in a row reminiscent of a catalog, evoking the systematicity of her aunt's notebooks.
The title of the exhibition connects two ecosystems that the artist brings into relation to each other – the arboretum and the rainforest. Between the landscaped space of the arboretum, in which nature is subjected to human order, and the rainforest, whose life takes place beyond our efforts to contain it, we find a space for contemplating two seemingly opposing aspirations. The need for order and control, so visible in the systematicity of Lidia's notebooks, competes with the longing for freedom, which, it seems, the protagonist of this story herself has never experienced. Namely, after suffering from tuberculosis as a child, Lidija was in fragile health, so she stayed to live with her parents until their death.
In the AŽ Gallery, Hušman also exhibits textual fragments from the future book, which take the visitor through the story of systematic attempts to establish order and the simultaneous impossibility of maintaining it, just as memories cannot be completely controlled by their "cataloguing".
In an attempt to imagine her aunt's everyday life, Ana Hušman visits the places she connects with the plant world that Lidija loved so much. Among them are various forest landscapes, whose meanings are not exhausted in the relationship between man and nature, but also include historical experiences of danger, limited movement and endangered freedom. The artist thus visits the Perućica rainforest, associated with the war experience of Sutjeska, marked by escape and attempts to break through the enemy ring, as well as the pedunculate oak rainforest Prašnik, which was mined during the war in the nineties, and later demined. She also encounters mined areas in Lika. Although these sites are related to different spaces and contexts, their tour opens up a related question for her: how free and accessible is space really if danger is hidden beneath its surface? In the video he is exhibiting as part of the exhibition, which features frescoes by Krsto Hegedušić filmed in the memorial center near Perućica, Hušman reflects on the relationships between landscape, historical experience and the limits of human control. Exploring Lidija's notebooks, he returns to the question: how much is it possible to control something, whether it is a landscape, life or memory, without something remaining hidden, elusive or even dangerous?
Mirna Rul

In her works, Ana Hušman analyzes the structure and texture of film elements through various forms of film, installation, book, image, sound, text. She experiments with the possibilities of animation, documentary and fiction elements in film, voice and articulation. Within work processes, she is interested in questioning and reversing the position of amateur and professional subjects of performativity, the medium itself and the structures that dictate and produce patterns of behavior. She works as a full professor at the Department of Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She is a co-founder of the RESTART association, where she has been leading a film education program for adults and children for many years.
For her latest works, she has received several national and international awards.
Her works have been shown at exhibitions and festivals around the world; 9th Gwangju Biennale, 53 October Salon, Belgrade, Medienturm Gallery, Graz; On the Eastern Front, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; "Lucy" Bodig & ART ON STAGE, URA, Istanbul, Stuttgarter Filmwinter; International Film Festival Rotterdam, 25 fps, Zagreb; DOK, Leipzig.