Vagon Gallery is proud to present Manifestations of not holding down the fork, the first solo exhibition by Karl Štefanek in Banja Luka, open from August 22 to September 2, 2025. This new series of works continues Štefanek's exploration of identity through poetry, installations and performance. The exhibition begins with Štefanek's poem, an intimate address to "you", in which the act of "non-angry holding of the jaw" becomes an act of rejection and a survival tactic. Between confession and declaration, the text sets the pace for an exhibition that treats language not only as material, but as a living, unruly body. The central place is occupied by the eponymous work Manifestations of not holding down the fork (2025), a series of plates inscribed with the author's poetry and notes. Read individually, these plates are fragile statements, fragile in both material and meaning; read together, they form a manifesto, a book of plates ready to be broken. Some of the plates are also filled with drawings, stickers and collaged fragments, so they overlap visually and verbally in acts of tenderness and defiance. Štefanek's work often involves playing with text and language; his use of text is simultaneously poetic and political, often inscribed directly on surfaces (leather, fabric, paper) as an extension of bodily discursiveness. The most visible example of this is his work I AM NOT, a six-meter-long LGBTQIA+ flag painted with acrylic letters, where queer theoretical discourse meets the aesthetics of protest, naive manifestation and losing oneself. Štefanek's practice consistently questions the lability of one's own identity through performative procedures. His ongoing cycle Self-titled (2022–) explores authorship and authenticity using the body and portrait as a site of discovery and resistance. Part of the same cycle, Something like time (In the event of), documents a four-hour performance in which Štefanek, stripped of everything, draws lines on a wall, four vertical and one diagonal, without revealing exactly what is being counted or when, or if, he will stop. Each stroke opens up room for speculation: is it days since arrival, hours until departure, years of departure, or time until the next break? What is being crossed out and what is being crossed over? At the opening, Štefanek will also perform the work Ah, I’m always so temporary. Stripped naked, the artist transforms into a living sculpture, exposed and immobile, with a temporary tattoo on his back. Although the work evokes the visual of rest, the performance destabilizes his presumed innocence: “The position of rest imitates the position of rape.
The posture of care imitates the posture of conquest.” Štefanek presents the horizontal body as a contested field, which nevertheless becomes accessible, legible, even appropriated. Taking a recumbent position, the artist turns the aesthetics of passivity into a sharp critique of both, through objects, poetry and performance, and accepts its cracks, substitutions and erasures the ways in which the heart can burst," concludes Štefanek in the song of the same name, "And I will not hold my jaw in anger."
Karlo Štefanek is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how identity is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through the mediums of self-portraiture and performance. At the age of eighteen, he moved to Amsterdam, where his first performance, Veneration of St. Sebastian, commissioned for CC Amstel and the Becoming festival in collaboration with Dutch artist Tobias Mud, marks a pivotal moment in which he discovers his penchant for performance, thus laying the foundation for the direction of his later works. Self-titled, a series of self-portraits begun in 2022, invites the audience into a space of constant self-discovery. The idea that presence is always unstable and subject to deconstruction is clearly visible in works such as The Artist Has Died and Missing from the same series. In The Artist Has Died (2024), Štefanek publicly announces his own death in the Croatian newspaper Jutarnji list, raising questions about institutional validation, authorship, reinvention and erasure. This work followed Missing (2023–), in which the artist placed posters of missing persons with his own image in cities such as Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Zagreb and Venice, turning the urban space into a platform for existential questions shaped by his encounters with those cities. Among other significant works are Hyaluron, a performance in which Štefanek undergoes an aesthetic intervention as a tribute to the artist ORLAN, and The Chair, a strategically placed object in key places of contemporary art – from Amsterdam's Museumplein to the Venice Biennale – which criticizes the institutional closure of access in contemporary art. In the work Against Self, performed during the Perforation festival in Zagreb, he becomes both a protester and a target of protest, confronting identity as an internal and external struggle. Štefanek has exhibited internationally such as the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (group exhibition By the Means at Hand initiated by the artist Vlatka Horvat), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and at festivals including Becoming (Amsterdam), SerformanceP (São Paulo) and Perforations (Zagreb). In 2025, the artist's solo exhibitions are planned in HDLU (Osijek), KIC (Zagreb),
Galeriji Vagon (Banja Luka) te ARL-u (Dubrovnik), a tu su i nadolazeća predstavljanja na 60. Zagrebačkom salonu, Okolo Around (Zagreb) i Perforacijama (Buenos Aires). Štefanek živi i radi između Zagreba, Amsterdama i New Yorka.
