Moot Roach; For the city of Zagreb; by Ken Dewey
Institute for Contemporary Art,
Music Biennale Zagreb,
House of Extreme Music Theatre
Public Open University Zagreb
Ulica grada Vukovara 68
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Lecture at 4:30 PM / POUZ, Ground Floor, Small Hall
Janka Vukmir, The first happening in Zagreb
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Happening at 6:00 PM / POUZ, Entrance Porch
Moot Roach, For the city of Zagreb
Performed by: Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo, House of Extreme Music Theatre
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As part of the 33rd Music Biennale Zagreb, the Institute for Contemporary Art and Janka Vukmir present a happening by American artist Ken Dewey, which he prepared in 1963, began the performance with his colleagues, but was quickly interrupted by the police.
Ken Dewey came to Zagreb as a member of the Ann Halprin Dancers’ Workshop, which performed her play Chair with 5 Legs at the 2nd MBZ. In Zagreb, he met a group of students that included the artist Josip Pepi Stošić, whose non-verbal play Bone and Stone he would later direct in Rome that year.
Janka Vukmir will present the development of that event, and the Moot Roach event, for the first time in its entirety and 62 years after its creation, will be recreated by Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo; House of Extreme Music Theatre.
Ken Dewey (1934-1972), American performance artist, playwright, director and arts administrator. He was active in the happening movement in the 1960s. After spending almost two years in Europe, in 1966 Ken Dewey became an employee of the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA). He was the director of program development and director of research. In 1970, he was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to serve on the New York State Commission on Cultural Heritage, a temporary state commission that Rockefeller established to study the current and long-term fiscal needs of cultural institutions. That same year, he was also the director of the Planning Corporation of the Arts, a year-long research project, partially funded by NYSCA, on the role of the arts in democracy. He served until his death as chairman of the National Committee for John and Yoko. Dewey died in a plane crash in 1972.
A posthumous retrospective of his work, Action Theatre: Happenings by Ken Dewey, was organized by the Franklin Furnace Archive in 1987, curated by Barbara Moore.
The film Ken Dewey – This is a Test, directed by Sally Williams, premiered at DOC NYC 2016.
Josip Stošić (1935–2009) was a poet, visual artist, and art historian. He worked at the Institute for the History of Art in Zagreb from 1967 until his retirement in 2000.
In 1951, as a sixteen-year-old, he published as a samizdat, a collection of poetry Đerdan, which was censored and banned because of “decadent forms and literary excess, alien to the socialist spirit and reality”.
Radical in its modernist experiment with the form and banalization of poetic language, in the spirit of concretist and letristic poetry, the collection, although preserved in only ten copies, was later recognized as a forerunner of Croatian intermediate and neo-avant-garde poetry, and the complete manuscript was reprinted in 2001.
His Visual Poetry is also presented in the form of conceptual and multimedia exhibitions, with catalogs or graphic maps, sometimes in the form of maps. The Institute for Contemporary Art organized an exhibition on the fifth anniversary of his death in 2014. A catalog/publication about his work is also in preparation.
Support:
Trust for Mutual Understanding, City of Zagreb, Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Croatia