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Inside the Island:

Site-specific installations and exhibitions on the Island of Veli Brijuni, Croatia curated by Silvia Potočki Smiljanić.

This exhibition drew on the history of the Brijuni Islands in Croatia for a series of site-specific installations and artworks that responded to its cultural and political history. Whilst the island was conspicuously used by Josip Tito as his summer residence after 1947, it had previously been owned by the Austrian industrialist Paul Kupelweiser in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My collaborative research with the curator in Pula had confirmed that the Wittgenstein family had regularly visited and stayed on Veli Brijuni as guests of Kupelweiser. My contribution to this exhibition was new work that imagined and explored Ludwig Wittgenstein's retreats to islands of thought in Ireland, Norway and Austria-Hungary. The works were exhibited in the original boat house where Wittgenstein would have arrived on the island. The exhibition was reviewed through a feature Interview with me published in Novi List•, Mediteran Culture Section. Tatjana Gromača Vadanjel Tragovima Wittgensteina i Sebalda: Guy Moreton. May 2010.The interview followed a symposium convened by Christine Frisinghelli (Editor, Camera Austria) and Dr Sandra Krizic Roban (writer and critic, and Senior Research Fellow Institute of Art History Zagreb). Its objective was to explore issues raised by the island of Veli Brijuni exhibition, and in particular the contents of a paper previously given by me, relating to place and landscape as central motifs in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W G Sebald. The published interview further draws out some of these themes, particularly through current British literature and in particular through the writing of Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane.

*Novi List is one of Croatia's oldest newspapers and has a circulation of between 40 - 50 000 people. The Culture section Mediteran is published on a Sunday and contains feature critical reviews and interviews by leading Croatian journalists, historians and writers.