NMG@PRAKTIKA_Vitar Drinković: INTERREALITY
20–27/11/2025
GALERIJA KLUBA KOCKA, DOM MLADIH SPLIT
ABOUT THE WORK
The exhibition Interreality explores how modern human experience is shaped on the boundary between the real and the virtual. Using photogrammetry, 3D modeling, video games, and extended reality (XR), Vitar Drinković creates works in which the body, technology, and everyday routines engage in dialogue. The artist draws on personal experience of constant connectivity and a precarious existence, contextualizing them within the digital age. In doing so, he questions productivity, physicality, relaxation, and myth, thus shaping the space for a new experience – interreality.
The video game Relaxation immerses visitors in a virtual space, allowing them to traverse a photogrammetric scan of Zagreb’s main railway station, relocated on the sea at the coast of Hvar and stripped of its original purpose. This digital dystopia and liminal space contain 3D models of artworks that function both as in-game installations and as standalone XR objects accessible through holographic technology.
Among them are Working While I Sleep and Working on a Computer, 3D scans of the artist himself. The first reinterprets Mladen Stilinović’s cult work Artist at Work through the lens of digital exhaustion. Prolonged work becomes the foundation of the artist’s creativity: he works even while sleeping, as algorithm-driven systems and constant online interconnectivity do not allow time for rest.
Simultaneously, sitting in front of a computer – a pose typical for a contemporary creator – becomes the basic form of bodily expression and a source of psychophysical burnout. The Hoe from Hvar, a 3D scan of a tool the artist’s father inherited from his grandfather, is a hommage to sculptor Slavomir Drinković and to the tradition of physical labor which symbolizes the connection to family roots and transformation within the context of contemporary digital feudalism – a system in which individuals invest energy into digital spaces without realizing ownership, with their “digging” becoming immaterial. As a tool for hard physical labor, the hoe turns into a paradoxical monument to human persistence and mental liberation through physical work, while also symbolizing the mental burden of digital labor, which brings neither “healthy” fatigue nor rest.
In the 3D model Mountain of Money and the animation Jumping, the artist confronts the contradictions of digital capitalism and cultural economy, in which wealth is visible, but unattainable, while endless jumping – a feeling of investing continuous effort, but still getting back to where you started – leads to a Sisyphean existence. This is further accompanied by the floating 3D model Beach Ball – Earth and the animation of the Protocol rocket – a poetic image of global irresponsibility in the age of the Anthropocene, global tension, and the individual’s helplessness in creating real change.
In this process, individuals enter the Selfie Hug, a state of emotional isolation and self-affirmation, in which they ultimately end up embracing themselves. The AI-generated scene taken from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain speaks of the loss of independent thought and action: in it, a 3D scan inside an egg-shaped container becomes alchemically “purified”, while a figure with the ChatGPT logo takes on the role of the alchemist – a symbol of the modern ritualistic encounter between humans and artificial intelligence.
The Efficiency Timer returns our focus to the body and transience, counting down the 20 years of the artist’s peak productivity and reminding us that, despite endless digital simulations, human time remains limited and irretrievable.
Interreality is a landscape of the present age, where digital and physical intertwine to the point of inseparability. Technology, as a medium of introspection and a mirror of society, shapes the mosaic of contemporary post-digital life. In this vortex of constant presence, the Sun Lounger provides a symbolic moment of rest – a brief pause necessary for survival.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vitar Drinković earned his Master’s in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2008, spending a semester at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA. He completed his Master’s in Animation and New Media at the same academy in 2014, and spent time at the London Metropolitan University, UK, as part of a student exchange program. He has held more than 20 solo exhibitions, authored 8 public sculptures, and participated in 14 art workshops. His work has been presented in over 60 group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad (Germany, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Austria, the Czech Republic, the UK, the USA, Canada, and France). Drinković has received several awards, recognitions, and scholarships, and was a finalist for the Radoslav Putar Award in 2021. He works at the intersection of technology, science, and art, creating interactive devices, inventions, and installations that mediate human communication, with the goal of exploring and creating new contexts – “conditions” for different sensory and intellectual experiences of everyday life. Member of HDLU (Croatian Association of Artists) and HZSU (Croatian Freelance Artists Association).
COLLABORATORS
Ognjen Kuharić – programming, Unreal Engine
Format C – art organization engaged in DIY culture, augmented reality technology
Branimir Štivić – programming of Efficiency Time
IMPRESSUM
CURATORS Karla Čudina, Vitar Drinković
NMG CURATORIAL TEAM Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov, Karla Čudina
TRANSLATION Karla Čudina
DOCUMENTATION Vanessa Barač
SETUP Vitar Drinković, Karla Čudina
DONORS Ministarstvo kulture i medija RH, Grad Zagreb, Grad Split
MAVENA IS SUPPORTED BY Zaklada Kultura nova
SPECIAL MENTION KUM, MKC, PDM
DESIGN Mladen Luketić
PRINT Kopiring
