The (in)visible artists: contemporary artists from Croatia in the post-1989 “globalized” contemporary art field

This research attempts to shed light on the processes of integration and recognition of contemporary artists from Croatia in the post-­‐‑1989 “globalized” contemporary art field. Encompassing a twenty-­‐‑year period (1991-­‐‑2012), the study aims to understand and explain, how the internal developments in Croatia, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the external modifications of the contemporary art field, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, impacted the international embeddedness of contemporary artists from Croatia. In contrast to most of the previous empirical studies on the globalization of contemporary art, which focused on Western Europe and the United States, and on the top-­‐‑level of the contemporary art field, this study expands the empirical examination to include a non-­‐‑Western zone and bring in an off-­‐‑central perspective, while juxtaposing the occurrences within the top-­‐‑level with those below that level. The generation of artists whose emergence paralleled the post-­‐‑1989 developments is the epicenter of the study, while the analysis of the internationally most established artists from the previous generations provided a comparative context and an intergenerational perspective. The study brings together and maps all the exhibition activities of the past two decades for a representative sample of 61 artists and examines them en masse, comparatively and apiece. The exhibition data (6400 exhibition participations in 1905 institutions) is studied applying both the methods of close and distant reading, and both for artists’ collective movement and their individual trajectories. The quantitative analysis is complemented by semi-­‐‑structured interviews with the artists, and a vast array of sources. The research provides novel insights into the post-­‐‑1989 processes of inclusion and recognition of contemporary artists from Croatia, within the context of the globalization of contemporary art, and brings new knowledge on the construction of “international careers” of non-­‐‑ Western contemporary artists. Moreover, the study – first of the kind for Croatian context – has very concrete implications for Croatian institutional and cultural policy strategists