ISBN: 978-953-8027-08-6
72 pages, 19 color images 20 x 13 cm
bilingual (Croatian / English), softcover
Publisher: Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb
Editors: Amela Frankl and Janka Vukmir
Texts: Ružica Šimunović, Marija Selak, Amela Frankl
Translation: Graham McMaster

The publication follows the eponymous exhibition held at the
Institute for Contemporary Art in 2017, curated by late Ružica
Šimunović. The exhibition has embraced three projects that speak of
“Three unfinished stories. About the consequences of historical and
social events, the individual and the community, about the
unspoken facts, about the inherited family burden that commits, the
transmission. Topics are old, sensitive, often overlapping,
suppressed.” A.F.

“And so then I start up the story of the three stories of Amela Frankl.
They are linked indirectly to the trauma of the Holocaust, revolve
around the issue of the connection, in the words of Giorgio
Agamben, of bare life and sovereign power. The artist explains that
‘she neither calls out nor calls for responsibility’. (…) Now when
they are in front of us, it is somehow clear that there must have
been, before their performance – and it cannot have been for any
other reason than the trouble of overcoming the condemnations of
the individual, society and their politics and the possible
entanglement in new accusations – a time of suspicions and
contractions of thoughts, a process that required touching the
stitches of the wounds, the endless opening and chasing of folds of
identity, all the way to the calming of passions, to restfulness. I
would almost call them commemorative.”
from the text by Ružica Šimunović

“Frankl focuses on the relation of individual and community,
studying it at three different but complementary levels, sketching
out an answer to the question of what our responsibility is in
engaging with the past. The first, the awakening, level … is an
attempt at an objective approach. She deals with the relation of
individual to common history. In the second, subjective, … the
emphasis is placed on experiencing, the possibility of setting up
links between the community and individual, in this case, one’s own,
history. Finally, synthetically, [her] performance is self-engaged, for
it determines to take on the responsibility for the telling of other
people’s past, showing what we can learn from it.”
from the text by Marija Selak