29. Split Summer Festival 1983

Curator: Here we have Boris Bućan’s “29. Split Summer Festival” poster, created in 1983. It's a screenprint, buzzing with colour and sharp lines. What’s your initial take on it? Editor: A masquerade ball invaded by Matisse, perhaps? It has this uncanny vibe – colourful but also somehow stiff, theatrical, almost a little…menacing? Curator: Menacing, really? I see a celebration, advertising the theatre festival… though I grant you, the masks are a bit unsettling. It is Croatian pop art from the '80s, after all. Nothing is simply cheerful then. Notice the stark flatness of the picture plane. Editor: Yes, a flatness that throws those stark reds and blues into high relief, as though surgically dissecting space, object, form. What does Bućan achieve through those figures hidden behind graphic forms or geometric fields? Curator: Well, the Split Summer Festival takes place in open-air historical locations. These figures, these masks are maybe chimeras of tradition and modernity; a recognition that cultural identity can also be a form of hiding, a performance? They aren’t people anymore – just signs floating in the dark air. Editor: So, a symbolic nod to how public events both reveal and conceal? That tension certainly gives the poster a depth that’s unexpected. Curator: I see this piece as a kind of time capsule of its era; but at the end it makes us realize there are things underneath we don’t quite understand or have seen. Editor: Right—I’m appreciating this in a different register now, too. What seemed jarring on the surface now vibrates with complexity. It lures you with bold graphics but lingers with this feeling of ambiguous darkness that you cannot simply evade.