sun worker / 2023

artist worker
nature forgotten
childhood gone

Sun as a circle, circle as a cycle, cycle as a year. 
And so, 71 times.

As old as the museum itself.

Josip draws his inspiration from the works of Ivan Rabuzin in the collection of the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art, which take him back to the “childhood gone” and the “nature forgotten”. These phrases were accidentally created through Josip’s misquotation of literature during his research for the project. The original phrases are “childhood forgotten” and “nature gone” (V. Crnković), but the accidental substitution actually resonated better with Josip’s sensibilities: “[…] nature that passes, that disappears, that we destroy. Childhood that we suppress, and try to escape, that we don’t remember.” Josip deconstructs Rabuzin’s method of constructing scenes with circular shapes by making the circle, the building block of Rabuzin’s compositions, autonomous, as well as the symbol of cyclical processes, by creating sand-filled balloons that he frames. He then seals these childhood “props”, for the pre-digital generation at least, by randomly choosing between the expressions “childhood gone” and “nature forgotten”. And so, 71 times, a full work shift, two days. In total, he creates 71 suns (let’s remind ourselves that the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art was founded in 1952 and this year marks its 71st anniversary). The final sun, the 71st year, is then symbolically transferred to the new building and placed in front of it as the foundation stone.Mateja Fabijanić

Croatian Museum of Naïve Art, 2023
Project curator / Mateja Fabijanić
Digital recordings and video / Vedran Husremović
Technical collaboration / Slaven Bugar, Emina Stamać

Acknowledgments / Miro Frakić and Željka Kuhar

© HMNU, 2023

The project has been made possible with financial support from the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.