60th Zagreb Salon: Choreography for the Finish Line at Oktogon (National Museum of Modern Art), Zagreb

60th Zagreb Salon: Choreography for the Finish Line by Andrej Beštak and Anja Leko, Valentina Butumović, Maja Milutin Čule and Katy Pyle, Kristian Kožul, Petra Mrša, Tea Stražičić, Silvio Vujičić, Mario Mu, Luka Mahmuljin Udovičić and Lea Vidaković, curated by KUĆĆA (Jurica Mlinarec, Klara Petrović, Luja Šimunović), at Oktogon (National Museum of Modern Art), Zagreb, 7.10. – 31.10.2025.

As soon as we stepped into the Oktogon space, we were met by a dense, expectant silence. It wasn’t the stillness of a museum, but the hush of a threshold, something that hints at a decision, a shift, perhaps even a risk. We immediately found ourselves asking: what does it mean today to cross a finish line? And what if that finish line is just a mirage, a moving target that shifts the moment we believe we’ve reached it? The exhibition’s title, Choreography for the Finish Line, evokes exactly that: an uncertain dance around an elusive end point. A collective motion towards something that remains, fundamentally, unresolved, yet no less real for it.

Beginning with the year 2000, the moment of the much-feared digital collapse, the curatorial framework by KUĆĆA (Jurica Mlinarec, Klara Petrović, Luja Šimunović) investigates our contemporary obsession with risk management, optimization, and control. But it does so through the aesthetics of play, where the stakes are always unclear, and ambiguity is the only rule. The exhibition gathers over 25 artworks, performances, lectures, and public interventions. Yet what defines this 60th Zagreb Salon most powerfully is its decentralization: more than twenty venues scattered across the city, from the architectural grandeur of the Oktogon to the interiors of public trams, from monumental architectural wrappings to nearly invisible gestures woven into the urban fabric. The Salon is not an event to attend, it’s a map to move through. You meander, you detour, you double back. Like a video game, but with your real body.

Inside the Oktogon, the curatorial approach plays with delicate balance. Works unfold not in spatial order but in choreographic time, there is no linear path, only a sequence of pauses and revelations. Visitors move as if within a slow algorithm, drifting into and out of proximity with the pieces. Some dominate the space. Others only emerge through stillness, bending down, or listening closely. The range of media is vast: video installations, sonic environments, participatory practices, digital and analog materials converge into a shared grammar. Each work, whether by established artists like Kristian Kožul or Silvio Vujičić, or rising voices like Tea Stražičić, Luka Mahmuljin Udovičić, or Valentina Butumović, engages with risk: the risk of failure, of misunderstanding, of excess, of disappearance.

We were struck by how the materiality itself seems governed by instability. Some installations appear to dematerialize; others cling to the floor like post-catastrophic debris. The artistic gesture is never neutral, it is an action in the world, a bid to take a stance in a game where victory is never guaranteed. In this sense, the exhibition also reads as a political inquiry. The “game” becomes a paradigm of our time: algorithms structuring desire, speculative economies, relationships shaped by quantification. But between “game” and “play”, both meanings carried by the Croatian word igra, there lies a possibility for release. Some works actively resist systems of control, introducing forms of creative defiance, irony, and levity. A kind of vitality that doesn’t deny risk, but reimagines it.

Small gestures, perhaps. But together, they compose an emotional atlas of our era. Choreography for the Finish Line offers no resolutions, no redemption. And so perhaps the end doesn’t matter, if each step is already a form.