Ivan Kožarić: A Retrospective – One of 100 Possible Ones

(exhibition catalog)

Ivan Kožarić, one of the most significant Croatian artists, died in 2020, only seven months before turning 100 in June 2021. To mark the centenary of his birth, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Zagreb organized a retrospective exhibition presenting more than 300 works from Kožarić's long career. Art without frames, borders, and beyond categories is the essence of his approach to art, in which there was no room for stagnation because the artist was starting from scratch every day.

The authors of the exhibition concept are Vladimir Čajkovac and Radmila Iva Janković, who also curated the exhibition and is managing the Kožarić Atelier at MCA.

The e-catalog follows the transformative changes in Kožarić's work across the decades. In addition to reproductions of works of art, finished projects, and impossible urban interventions, readers can also see photographs of the exhibition installation by Boris Cvjetanović.

The exhibition catalog in English is available online.

Liber and the Mummy

The book’s title refers to the two most famous objects from the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb: the Zagreb Mummy and the Linen Book of Zagreb, or in Latin—Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis.
The mummy, wrapped in linen bands bearing inscriptions, was purchased in Egypt in 1848 by Mihael Barić, and displayed at his home in Vienna. In 1862 the mummy and its wrappings were transferred to Zagreb and then stored at the National Museum, the predecessor of the Archaeological Museum.

Among the items accompanying the mummy as part of the grave goods was a papyrus written in hieratic. From the legible sections, it could be deciphered that the name of the mummified woman was Nesi-hensu and that she was the wife of Paher-hensu, a "divine tailor" from Thebes.

The significance of the wrappings was not noticed until 1892 when Austrian scholar and Egyptologist Jakob Krall identified it as the only extant linen book containing the longest text in the Etruscan language ever discovered, dated to approximately 390 BCE. The book's fabric was preserved when it was used for mummy wrappings in Ptolemaic Egypt. It remains mostly untranslated because of the lack of knowledge about the Etruscan language, though the few words that can be understood indicate that the text is most likely a ritual calendar.

This bilingual publication consists of texts written by experts in history, linguistics, radiology, and graphology, divided into three parts: History, The Etruscan language, and Recent research.

Liber and the Mummy
Publisher: Archaeological Museum in Zagreb
Pages: 94
Language: Croatian, English
ISBN: 978-953-8143-34-2

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