Željko Beljan / Draw
Solo exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
The work "Unresolved" is a spatial installation consisting of two goals joined in a tripod with an unfinished, handmade net, and stripped soccer balls. By transforming some of the key elements of the game of football, I play with the boundary between art and play.
As in the previous work "Three Corners Penalty", presented in September 2022 in collaboration with Atelier Žitnjak, here I intertwine play and art, focusing on folk art and handicrafts and my love for football.
In my recent works, I associate the epithet "hobbyist", which is often associated with handicrafts, as something we use to fill our free time, with football as a hobby, i.e. the game of football from the street and guerrilla wild fields where football was and remains a game, friendly competition with friends and acquaintances, far from the glamour and megalomaniac industry that are the main associations with professional football. Today, football has become a multi-billion dollar industry where children are recruited from the age of five in the hope of becoming football stars; stadiums that are dislocated from the neighborhoods where the clubs were created are reminiscent of shopping malls where a football match is only one, almost a secondary part of the entire experience. My love for football began at an early age, when I started practicing football as a talented child, but it was short-lived; I have never been interested in stepping into professionalism, football has always been a game for me, and the pressures that children at that age face with the goal of becoming professional football players were already repulsive to me at the time. But the love for football has remained to this day. Today, I regularly visit third-league football fields where people come exclusively to watch football, families and children follow their neighborhood club on fields where the only content is football, played by semi-amateur enthusiasts who do their daily chores during the week, and on weekends they put on football boots and enjoy the game for 90 minutes. This is exactly what prompted me to start working on a series of works on football themes, connecting hobbyist handicraft as an "inferior" form of artistic expression and lower-league (any amateur) football, "inferior" to the form of play that is present in the media.
Željko Beljan
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Željko Beljan (Vukovar, 1984) is a visual artist with a primary interest in working with textiles. In 2021, he completed his graduate studies in New Media at the Department of Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. He lives and works in Zagreb. Through his artistic work, he explores the phenomenon of handicraft and its position in contemporary art, as well as soft art, folk and outsider art. He is currently a resident of the European Alliance of Academies program "Ignorance is Strength" and a participant in the educational program of the WHW Academy (generation of 2022).
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
You can see the exhibition during the working hours of the Šira Gallery, (Mon-Fri: 9-16 h, 18-20 h, Saturdays: 11-16 h) until 20.11.2022.
