Looking For Work

The exhibition is based on the documentation of a year-and-a-half-long action of looking for work, evolving around an ad stating: Visual artist urgently looking for any kind of work, which was published continuously in local advertising publications.

While responses to the ad came mainly from men offering suspicious work such as massage, accompaniment on travels, nude photography, “performances” in night bars..., the project also developed through researching job columns with an aim of undergoing the experience of work.

During the project, the artist worked as a cleaner, a waitress, a vendor, a distributor... In all cases, apart from the work found “through a connection”, she was underpaid and treated as a person of lower rank. Apart from dealing with the research into the labour market in a time of the highest unemployment rate in Croatia, the project Looking For Work questions the status of contemporary artists in Croatian society and problematizes the insufficiency of the artistic profession, with an emphasis on the position of women artists and the field of visual art.

The conditions in which (not only) Croatian visual artists work are cheap production, unpaid work, a non-existent contemporary art market and a lack of systematic promotion on an international level. Survival within the profession is possible only with external sources of income. (Milijana Babić)

Organization: City of Women; In partnership with: Škuc Gallery.
Supported by: EU Culture.

Free entry.