NMG@PRAKTIKA
23.4.–30.4.2026.
CLUB KOCKA GALLERY, YOUTH CENTER SPLIT
VID REDŽA: There Where the Avalanche Stops
Opening: Thursday, April 23rd at 20:00
The exhibition is open to visitors from Monday to Thursday during the gallery’s working hours from 17:00 to 20:00
Club Kocka Gallery, Youth Center Split, Ulica Slobode 28
With a fragmented knowledge of his origins, tied to an Albanian family line, as his point of departure, Vid Redža (re)defines his roots through a layered photographic process. He brings together a range of diverse objects, places, people, and customs into a visual diary that is at once a documentary reconstruction and an imagined narrative – a space between fact and projection, wherein identity is not uncovered but rather gradually assembled through memory and association.
The artist identifies the first rupture in his genealogy in his grandfather’s departure from Kosovo to modern-day Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia, during which the original family name of Rexha was altered to Redža. The significance of migration in his work is often represented by geographical maps. One such map, which stands out, displays the prevalence of the Albanian ethnic minority across 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavia. Redža hangs this map on an outdoor clothesline, and gives it a red canvas backdrop, invoking Albanian national symbolism, but also constructing a kind of improvised photography studio in the open, not unlike the makeshift studios used as places for production as well as display by photographers in times of migration and with limited access to equipment.
Maps displaying Albania’s rugged mountainous terrain, or ones reduced to mere toponymic nomenclature, become metaphors for the artist’s partial knowledge – a knowledge capable of delineating a space, but not of defining its deeper contents and memories. The thread of a lost home runs through the collage of maps, objects and family photographs, and can be plainly seen, for instance, in the portrait of the artist’s grandfather tucked into the knitted angel figurine, forming a hybrid relationship between partial acquaintance and collective custom. Similarly, by arranging multiple maps of Albania in a sequence, all of them leading to the same place in increments of 20 kilometers, the artist stages an allegorical journey into a past that is forever out of reach.
By recording scenes from Albania and Croatia – from traditional Albanian dances to an Albanian-owned newsstand in Ivanić-Grad – Redža establishes connections between traditions and acquaintances which nevertheless remain fragile and partial. The photographs thus shed their inherent function as mere documents, and become the instruments of inquiry. Yet rather than affirm or renew lost connections, they remain bound by factual immediacy and the artist’s personal interpretation of the idea of home.
Symbolically placing his family photographs upside down, Redža acknowledges that this is a labyrinth, ultimately leading nowhere. In this space, identity is not predetermined; it takes shape through the process of searching, questioning, imagining. In the same manner, the path to one’s own origin remains obscured and unfinished – like an attempt to arrive at a place that exists more in thought than in reality – “there, where the avalanche stops.”
Vid Redža (born 2000) is a second-year graduate student in Photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, where he also completed his undergraduate studies in Cinematography. He has exhibited in group shows U procesu (Gallery f8, 2021 and 2024). His first solo exhibition, Self-Portrait, was held at the Crta Gallery in Zagreb in 2024, as part of a collaboration between the Academy of Dramatic Art and the Maksimir Cultural Center. He is the recipient of the 2023 VID Foundation mentorship grant for the project There Where the Avalanche Stops, which was also displayed at the international exhibition Echoes of Identity (Hague, 2024). His work explores themes of identity, family, and social roles, using photography as the primary medium.
The NMG – New Media Gallery is an international curatorial platform focused on research projects related to issues surrounding active participation in modern society. Such projects result in novel curatorial concepts, inter-media events, international new media collaborations, and the creation of new media projects. The NMG@PRAKTIKA exhibition program is a vital part of this platform, showcasing independent young artists from Croatia and abroad in the Club Kocka Gallery at the Youth Center in Split, Croatia. This year marks 14 years of the program being active, over the course of which over 120 artists have shown their work. Through the usage of new media and experimentation with various forms of artistic expression, the exhibitions foster discourse about salient issues in contemporary society. This exhibition cycle therefore not only offers insights into the latest developments in artistic practice, but also actively participates in positioning contemporary art as a critical element in relation to social reality.
CURATOR Karla Čudina
NMG TEAM Karla Čudina, Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov, Antonela Radun, Jelena Rogošić
TRANSLATION Ivan Berecka
DOCUMENTATION Jelena Rogošić
SETUP Karla Čudina, Vid Redža
DONORS Ministarstvo kulture i medija RH, Grad Split
MAVENA IS SUPPORTED BY Zaklada Kultura nova
SPECIAL MENTION KUM, PDM
DESIGN Mladen Luketić
PRINT Kopiring
