Week 5: Lecture 4 - Nadija Mustapić

Lecture 4: Nadija Mustapic

Nadija Mustapić (Rijeka, 1976) works predominantly in video installation, but her practice included documentary and experimental film, installation, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and performance. Since 2006, she lives and works in Rijeka, Croatia. She is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Applied Arts, The University of Rijeka where she teaches at Media Arts and Practices graduate program.

In some of her work, she explores multi-dimensional relations between the representation of space, its subjectivity and political contingency. Her approach is based on audio-visual documentarism that focuses on abstracting, fragmenting and constructing poetic narratives, considering therefore documentarismn as an expandable category. She also often employs fictional elements as well as psychogeography to trigger changes in the viewers’ perception of a place in time. The non-linear narratives constructed around places that evoke contingent conditions, states of being or meanings get translated into immersive spatial video/audio installations.

Exhibitions and Installation Work
Mustapić has exhibited in over 30 solo (MMSU – Rijeka, Cecile R. Hunt – St.Louis, MKC – Split, the Home of HDLU – Zagreb..), over 50 group exhibitions and festivals (15th Venice Biennale Architettura, Si:n Festival o video art & performance – Ramallah, Faulconer Gallery – Grinnell, TH-T Award – Zagreb, Directors Lounge – Berlin, Instants Video – Marseilles, Contemporary Art Ruhr Media Art Fair – Essen, Art Kino Croatia – Rijeka..) in Croatia and internationally. Her artistic practice also includes collaborations. She is one of founding members of The Moving Crew art collective (www.themovingcrew.org). Mustapić has received different stipends and awards (Saari Residency/Konnen Foundation, Headlands Artist-in-Residence, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Assistantship, Peggy Guggenheim Museum Internship..).

Education
She graduated from the faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, which is part of the Art Department at the University of Rijeka (BFA, 1999). In 2004, she earned her MA and in 2005 her MFA degree (graduated with honours) from the University of Iowa (printmaking/intermedia).

Other Notes:
- An installation is a territory that displays an experience and constructs a relationship between the mind, body and space.

- With spatiality, you must consider sound as part of the experience to make it more engaging for your audiences. It can create various different atmospheres and distances, especially with the use of surround sound. e.g. Mustapic's 3-way audio installation "I don't know about the rest of the world, but here...'

- Rikard Bencic 2008 documentary film focuses on an industrial property based in the centre of an Eastern European city, constructed in the mid-1800s. It's a film about the loss of social identity and deals with representation, subjectivity and the political reality of spaces and cultures.

- An Afternoon without Gravity (2010) is a 2-channel video installation by Mustapic. It considers the physical and metaphorical weight of a building and the alternative narratives that could be constructed around the site itself as if it experienced zero gravity.