25/11/2025

Vito Trbuljak: Unknown Rules

-

On Saturday, 29 November 2025 at 7 p.m., an exhibition by Vito Trbuljak, Unknown Rules, will open at Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art.

The exhibition is part of the program Open Slot 2025, a public call through which Apoteka encourages new models of exhibiting and supports diverse artistic media, practices, and positions. The program is intended for artists, curators, and art historians, and especially for the younger generation and students of fine arts academies, enabling them to develop, present, and publicly exhibit their work. Through this program, Apoteka strives to remain an open space of support, providing production, financial, and technical conditions to those who often lack them.

Out of thirty applications submitted to the open call, the jury—Viktor Popović, Patricija Počanić, and Matija Debeljuh—selected the work of Vito Trbuljak as the most compelling proposal for presentation in Apoteka’s space.

In Apoteka, Vito is exhibiting a series of diagrams of unknown values / graphic backgrounds made by basic digitals tools like Paint and Preview.

The prints are inspired by athletic fields and board games, however they don’t contain any strictly defined rules. Every diagram consists of fields and lines. No two visuals are the same.

A randomly chosen object is places inside a field. The rest of the surface is filled with small pins connecting the diagrams into a whole. They act as traces or signposts, but without a strict logic, making they seem like elements of a game which, in fact, doesn’t even exist in a clearly defined sense.

I place around twenty tokens in the drawers. Each token is linked to a website I found interesting during my work. The tokens are available only to a smaller number of visitors, who can take them and thus acquire the right of intervening into the exhibition, moving an object from smaller variables to the biggest, common one. That way the exhibition changes while it is on and the audience takes part in the design process. Although everybody can see the work, only some have access to some of its individual layers.

The piece Unknown Rules thus combines the digital and the physical, coincidence and structure, the public and the hidden, starting from the idea that we move on a daily basis inside structures that seem clear, yet whose rules are in fact unknown.

The spectators are divided into two groups: those who can intervene and those who can only observe. This reflects the real world, in which some have access to information and the possibility to act, and the others don’t. That way the exhibition opens as a simple yet layered system in which the participants themselves discover and create their own rules, without a warranty that they even exist.

The interpretation of this work is in the eye of the beholder. The pins, objects, diagrams and tokens shape a grid connecting the fragments into a shared context. Only through interaction and collective reflection of all the participants do all the parts get a meaning, and the total ‘why’ becomes a shared experience, not absolute and not predefined.

Hence, this installation is not an archive with a fixed system or an illustration of an idea, rather a living optical capsule of indefiniteness and change, in which images, feelings and objects intertwine and constantly reshape each other. It invites the spectator not to seek finite, fixed truths, but rather to embrace the process of the constant transformation of meaning. This process makes a passive observer an active experience co-creator, opening room for creative freedom and critical thinking about the complexity and non-linearity of the perception of reality.

Vito Trbuljak

Vito Trbuljak (Zagreb, 1997) is an artist whose work explores how personal voice and position are shaped in a world where symbols, information and gestures quickly lose stability and meaning. His interest is focused on the ways meanings falls apart, change or disappear and the processes defining the visibility and identification of individual gestures.

He graduated in new media in 2021 from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb, Department of Animation and New Media, under professor Ana Hušman. Since 2023 he is a member of Croatia Artists’ Association (HDLU).

He has had solo exhibitions at the galleries Kamba (2025), Prozori (2024), LEXART (2024), Karas (2023) and Ligatura (2023). He took part in group exhibitions at the galleries Prsten and PM (HDLU, 2023) and Greta (2018).

back to exhibitions