Sven Stilinović was still a schoolboy when he started exhibiting with the Group of Six Artists on the streets of Zagreb in 1975. Photographic enlargements of small collages in which he recycled fragments of older photographs and tiny objects, as well as series where photographs of garbage interchange in a photographic sequence with photographs of cluttered shops raise the issue of photographic motif, while in “Comparison of the development of painting and non-development of photography” (1975) he concludes that that which is offered as a history of photography does not lead to its openness and creativity.

With texts from Ivana Bago, Branko Cerovac, Suzana Marjanić, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Branka Stipančić, Raša Todosijević, Goran Trbuljak.

In the artist’s book My sweet little lamb, Mladen Stilinović deals with the relationship between language and reality and the resulting identity constellations. In doing so, he makes reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “language-games,” where the simple use of linguistic elements is always intertwined with actions to gauge their actual meaning. The artist employs quotations from Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” such as: “Everything we see could also be otherwise,” “Objects I can only name,” and “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” These sentences also relate to objects and actions that the artist witnessed on the street, such as a delivery van for meat with the image of a piglet printed on the outside and the accompanying slogan “My sweet little lamb.” Stilinović thereby questions the reality of what one sees in combination with its textual denotation in the sense of a “language-game.” This particular work refers to different religions and their eating customs in its specific naming of food.

Produced on the occasion of Mladen Stilinović’s exhibition Cinizam siromašnih / The Cynicism of The Poor at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, in 2001, this catalogue features texts by Nada Beroš, Tihomir Milovac, Danijel Dragojević, alongside documentation of the works Ljudi s vrećicama (Bag-People) (2001), and Pokapanje boli (Buried Pain) (2000).

My sweet little lamb (Everything we see could also be otherwise) is a series of exhibition episodes based on the Kontakt Collection and dedicated to the artist Mladen Stilinović, unfolded in Zagreb and London in 2016–2017. This publication, conceived as a “post-episode” of the project, presents extensive visual documentation of the exhibitions alongside newly commissioned texts by theorists and writers Branislav Dimitrijević, Miguel A. López, Oxana Timofeeva, and Marina Vishmidt. Drawing on the legacy of the Eastern European neo-avantgarde and the work of Stilinović in particular, these contributions grapple with urgent questions about the value of art and exhibition making. Including the work of Mária Bartuszová, Stano Filko, Tina Gverović, Katalin Ladik, Sanja Iveković, Běla Kolářová, Július Koller, Edward Krasiński, Dóra Maurer, Goran Trbuljak, KwieKulik, Ivan Kožarić, Vlado Martek, Mangelos, Heimrad Bäcker, Stephen Willats.

This publication is an unedited reprint of the catalogue originally published by de Appel in 1980 as a follow-up to the international art manifestation Works and Words. The event sought to break with the one-way traffic of Western artists traveling to the East by inviting artists from Eastern Bloc countries to Amsterdam. The invited artists, theoreticians, film-makers, and art historians represented a broad spectrum of practices, theoretical approaches, and developments. Including artists such as; KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemysłav Kwiek), Július Koller, Jiří Kovanda, Dóra Maurer, Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis, Mladen Stilinovic, Jozef Robakowski amongst others.

You can find more information on the exhibition here.

The artistic practice of Mladen Stilinović, one of the founders and the liveliest protagonists of conceptual art in Croatia and the region, may be presented by using the key words, i.e. words that introduce the core problem and the procedures that the artist uses: language, ideology, manipulation, appropriation, correction, irony, installation, de-contextualization, exploitation, repetition, tautology. In Stilinović’s well-known Dictionary–Pain (2000–2003) have been crossed out white and changed into one and the same word of unique meaning—pain—in a potential “imperatival dictionary” some words could easily change places and the structure without the change of meaning.