Ana Prvački

As part of her commission for Mamula Island Hotel, Ana Prvački orchestrates a site-specific event in two acts.

In the first act, Ana Prvački draws from her own experience of the island and creates a series of watercolors along with a complementary concepts guide for Mamula Island Hotel. The original watercolors, serving as the guide's illustrations, depict various elements and props inspired by the hotel's environment, nature, and the stories that derive from them. The audience and visitors are invited to use this 'alternative' guide to view their surroundings through new and unexpected prisms, engaging in a game of observation and imagination that stimulates their senses.

For Prvački, watercolors represent a daily practice that broadly encapsulates her playfulness and wit, as well as her unique way of approaching the conditions surrounding us. Within this series, among other things, she invites us to listen to the hum of Apis Mamula, a native bee species, and to savor a beverage crafted from locally sourced Montenegrin ingredients, which are also featured in the hotel's bar and spa. Her work inspires us to venture beyond standardized experiences, engaging our senses through the realms of scent, touch, and contemplation.

In the second act, Prvački presents a performance on and around the island, inviting the audience to immerse themselves in a live sonic landscape brimming with sentiments of yearning and nostalgia. This captivating performance is a collaboration with opera singers Kate and Alex, further enhancing the sensory journey for all participants.

Ana Prvački is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice takes the form of diverse projects that draw from daily practices, consumer aesthetics and popular concerns. Her work ranges from watercolour to video, performance to mixed reality. Ana Prvački has training and background in music, theatre, mask work, architecture, fine art and beekeeping. Her projects foreground experimentation in content and form, and are often of ephemeral nature both as a strategy for creating unique experiences and as a nod to an environmentally conscious artistic practice.

She has held solo exhibitions and projects at prominent venues such as NTU CCA in Singapore, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Turin. Her work has also been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the 2020 Bangkok Biennial, the 13th Gwangju Biennial, the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the 1st Singapore Biennial, and documenta (13). Prvački's performances have been commissioned by prestigious institutions like the L.A. Philharmonic and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2020, she was part of the Marina Abramović Sky Arts T.V. takeover. Additionally, in 2019, during her residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Ana collaborated with Google Arts & Culture on Detour, a Webby Award-winning alternative museum tour.