Born 1990, Zagreb, Croatia. Painting, collage.
Nothing changed in me, as well as in the world
Ivan Oštarčević
My working relationship expired as the pandemic started and the difficulty of acquiring a new work position was hard. So was the desire to have something to pay the bills and be capable of living in a new world full of confusion and adaptable but strict rules including being obligated to stay at home.
Conveniently, my home is also my studio, with a computer with daily updates and a space to get all of the necessary information I need. The time I had to reflect on this situation had me analyzing humanity and the past, including its reflection on the present.
What I learned did not surprise me. Nothing changed in me, as well as in the world. The same aforementioned confusion was just more evident in a new area and the disbelief in standard hierarchies stayed the same. Not one moment made me conform and exploit the pandemic as a way to use the new iconography and become popular on social media.
I did my work as I usually do, with high concepts and with a refreshed perspective on every new cycle by using my personal history and accumulated knowledge to birth a new being into existence. I used all of histories references and their images and combined them with pop culture, to be as literal as I can be.
Some rules of engagement changed, but not me. My mission is to stay truthful and attempt to send a message into the world. Of unity through struggle, personal improvement and a constant, perpetual cycle of learning everything that can help us.
We stopped having the luxury of a firm belief in something. Adding up the factor of the informational tidal wave, in sudden moments we are coerced into a revision of knowing what we were educated in so we start being cynical when we see older learnings still being dragged around. History is malleable and together with its revisions forms new relations brings the discussion of leaking the documents of Japanese war crimes during the Second world war. After the horrors that Stalin ordered were exposed, these recent developments reveal what was hidden behind samurai swords, Hello Kitty and a nation obsessed with precision and food machines.
The horrors of Unit 731 are in range with the medical experiments of Mengele, this time with Satoshi Ishi in the director’s chair. The cruelty to prisoners and the deftly workaround of the Geneva convention in the manner that war is not fought with chemical weapons, but with plague epidemics looks like something expected from a Bond villain. Although, to be honest, Bond villains did not practice live autopsies in the name of science and notice that it is interesting some people live through the process. They did not expose people to freezing and producing freeze burns to try healing them, they also did not inject syphilis into pregnant women to observe what can happen with the fetus. Bond villains stayed with the memes, the classics by using sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.
The work cycle is using a direct pop cultural quote of the embodiment of everything evil in the universe, an irredeemable opponent, which is known for his varied forms and transformations and someone we will find in Japanese literature. He is positioned in contrast with historical figures and contemporary bastions of success and reveals the parallels of revision of the known about someone or something. The character is fictional, that is the reason he is painted, but the historical figures are photographs as documents of what is, what happened and what is still clinging to us.
Art project #365daysafter