Click, Post, Play

How does the Network, through algorithms and filters, shape our bodies and what impact does it have on the user’s inner life? The film program Click, Post, Play, and the accompanying artist talk, which we will host on July 20 at 8 PM on the ground floor of MMCA, in cooperation with curator Elena Apostolovski, addresses exactly this burning topic contemporary topic – the ubiquity of the screen in our lives.

Curator Elena Apostolovski chooses three films for this program: Striptease (2020, 6′) by Dora Brkarić, Apatia y Devocion (2022, 18′) by Carmen Roca Igual, and A Two Way (2022, 6′) by Helena Roig Prats.

Research into the relationship between the body and the camera is documented in the film Striptease by the performer Dora Brkarić. In the film Apatia y Devocion by Carmen Roca Igual, a girl on a spiritual journey tries to get over a breakup, which penetrates the stereotypes of relationships and self-improvement. A Two Way by Helena Roig Prats brings a dialogue between her and a sex worker about working conditions on the Internet, streamed live via the Only Fans platform.

Elena Apostolovski is an independent curator, writer, and educator. She seeks to question the relationship between social reality, artwork, and the audience while affirming experiencing art as the physical experience of the body in space shared with other people. Her practice focuses on exploring interpersonal relationships in physical and digital reality shaped by dominant ideologies, aiming to find strategies that contribute to strengthening the connection within the community and disrupting conventions. Curiosity leads her to frequent collaborations with individuals and associations from the social and technical sciences, dance and performance. She works as a program coordinator and agent in an artist-run space and community platform the Instrument Inventors Initiative in the Hague.

Dora Brkarić, after graduating in contemporary dance from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, continues her studies in choreography at TEAK (Helsinki) and SNDO (Amsterdam). She works as a performer for Matej Kejžar, Simone Aughterloney, Flavia Pinheiro, Mehdi Farajpour and many others. Her practice arises at the intersection of digital and physical space, including performance, video works, installations in gallery spaces and theater.

Carmen de la Roca is a lens-based artist researching human behavior and the social makeup we apply in relation to new media. Her work combines identity, technology, empowerment and the role of new media, but also the essential pursuit of communication, spirituality, and connection that most humans are in search of. She researches and explores experiences through fictional characters as a proxy to hers and society’s dilemmas. The characters live through contemporary narratives as they discover how to utilize the content they create in this attention economy. Roca Igual graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 2020. Her work was officially selected for the #AmLatino Film Festival and was nominated for the Young Talent Award during Dutch Design Week. She has assisted artists and filmmakers Amalia Ulman and Pauline Curnier Jardin, and her work was shown before in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Rijeka.

Helena Roig Prats is a visual artist with a photo documentary background based between the Netherlands and her home country Spain. Her working process is always driven by collaboration and community-building processes, and often points out the perverse relationship between medium and power. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, while cursing their studies in photography at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague, her artistic practice has been focused on dissecting the idea of digital intimacy and the ways how its narratives circulate among millennials. Her storytelling is based on humor, randomness and radical honesty. She is a part of the artist at the artist-run space Trixie in the city of Den Haag(NL) and a cultural project called La Volta in Girona (SP). She has presented her work in exhibitions, screenings and performances at The Grey Space in the Middle (The Hague), Espai nyamnyam (Mieres), Art festival La Bianyal (Olot), Contemporary art center Bòlit (Girona), Impakt Festival (Utrecht), DE BOUWPUT (Amsterdam), Berlin Film Porn Festival, Weimar Queer film Festival, STIFF Galerija SKC (Rijeka), International Women’s* Theatre Festival (Frankfurt), Brussels and Vienna Porn film festival, Hangar (Barcelona), Hotel Mokum (Amsterdam), Ars Electronica (Linz), XXL Dreams at Laak Club (Den Haag) and Filmhuis Den Haag.

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After the screening program in Rijeka, the artists Dora Brkarić, Carmen Roca Igual, and Helena Roig Prats will present their works on the exhibition held in the Novo Gallery in Pula, which will open on Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 8 PM. Titled Meanwhile, in the Glossy Interface, the exhibition looks into the parallel stories of our everyday life, collecting the perspectives of various online residents. Curated by Elena Apostolovski and hosted by the association METAMEDIJ from Pula, the exhibition will last until August 20, 2024.

Co-organized by: MMSU Rijeka and Metamedia Association, Pula
Coordination MMSU: Sabina Salamon
Supported by: HAVC, Stroom Den
Title photo: still from the film Apatia y Devocion