After recently presenting her credentials to the President of the Republic, Zoran Milanović, Danish Ambassador Anne Toft Sørensen and the Mayor of Zagreb, Tomislav Tomašević, signed an agreement on further cultural collaboration between the Danish Embassy and the City of Zagreb. The opening of “The Eight Sea” by Danish-Bosnian artist Ismar Čirkinagić is a great example of how culture can create connections across borders. The exhibition is open until November 8 at MSU Zagreb.
The Eighth Sea is a solo exhibition by Ismar Čirkinagić, to be presented at MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. Through works that invite reflection on our relationship with nature, history and political reality, the exhibition explores humanity’s growing loss of direction in a world shaped by war, political conflict and ecological crisis.
As in many of his previous exhibitions, Čirkinagić approaches the world through both a poetic and critical lens, juxtaposing the tragedy of man-made conflict with the quiet beauty of nature’s continual passage. Nature emerges as a silent witness to destruction, displacement and historical trauma.
For more than two decades, war and political conflict have been central to the artist’s practice, often rooted in his own experiences of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this exhibition, the perspective expands into a broader global context, connecting conflicts from different parts of the world through a universal reflection on destructive power structures, alienation and a gradual loss of orientation.
The title The Eighth Sea refers to the idea of an imaginary eighth sea. While the expression ‘the seven seas’ has historically served as a metaphor for the entirety of the known world, the eighth sea is not a physical body of water, but a mental landscape in which civilisation’s greed, global crises and human alienation are reflected in a horizon without direction.
Source: Embassy of Denmark in Zagreb