Zlatko Kopljar. From K series

The Ongoing K

Zlatko Kopljar’s film K18 (2014) is the most recent chapter in an ongoing body of work that he classifies as a sequence of numbered Ks. Kopljar's art practice oscillates between video performance, as in K5 (1999), where the artist lies prone on top of a white sheet, his hands covering his ears as noise erupting from two loudspeakers in front of his head assaults him for half an hour; experimental cinema, such as K13 (2010), an athmospheric film presenting the re-emergence of an historical stucture as revelatory and euphoric event; architectural interventions, as in K4 (2002), where the artist blocked the main entrance to the old buliding of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb for the entire period of a group exhibition of which he was part; projected-image installations, such as K12 (2008), a two-channel video installation showing the images of the artist in a cosmic interaction with a reflective white sphere, and hanging on a branch; and conceptual photography, as in K9 Compassion (2003), a series of staged photographs depicting the artist from the back as he kneels in front of New York's most famous locations, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Guggenheim Museum, and the UN Headquarters, among others.

In almost all the seventeen preceding Ks, Kopljar was playing the leading role and from one K to the next his figure became irreducibly multifaceted—both personal and representational, particular and symbolic. Yet in K18, Kopljar's figure is no longer active and is seen only for a short time. Instead, the protagonists of K18 are a lifeless, post-disaster black forest, the thick water channels that pass through it, the muddy water swamps scattered in it, and the fragmented movement of the camera that represents all of this. These are accompanied by a soundtrack of speaking voices citing Miloš Djurdjević’s poem Lie Down Again (2013). As suggested by its title, Djurdjević’s poem articulates and stages the different steps of a human burial from the perspective of the dead body, as well as from the perspective of the funeral’s living participants.

In certain moments the speaking voices resonate with the movement of the camera, and in others the moving imagery can be understood as the spatialization of the given speaking voice. The two-directional exchange between sound and image in K18 turns the natural surroundings of the forest into

a mythological, animistic, anthropomorphized landscape, inevitably situated within a German-Romantic context, i.e. outside the historical time and the social space of the city, outside the gaze of the law, the map of culture, and the limits of reason.

In K13 (2010), Kopljar connects the forest and the city and posits each of them as the other’s opposite, as his figure leaves the dark forest and arrives at the glowing Zagreb Lightbulb Factory—one of the landmarks of the eastern entrance to the city. Kopljar enters the brightly lit building dressed in a light suit, one that he wears in all the most recent Ks (K13-K18). While in K13 the difference between light and darkness is defined as part of a dichotomous division between culture and nature, city and forest, modern time and archaic time, in K18 this division does not exist. In the film light is not a negation but a continuation of darkness; it is a blank, an interval, an empty hole, a void. Announced by a scream and seen from afar, K18’s first figure of light is in the form of a square whose white glow is immediately associable with Kopljar’s light suit, and with the figure of Kopljar, which soon after, as the camera looks down and wanders over the shallow water, is found lying prone and showing no sign of life.

Though lacking the historical characteristics of time and place or connection to the outside world, Kopljar’s empty, white glow opens a range of historical affinities. Because it is empty, it can be filled by and recall many other bodies that were found lying prone in many other dark forests, when showing no sign of life.