news

Photography of the presentation of Moneystains at Studio Tommaseo (ph. by Agnese Divo)

On Saturday 24 December 2022 at 6 pm, Trieste Contemporanea presents the book Moneystains by Breda Beban at Studio Tommaseo. The work is the original screenplay for the film of the same name that the artist would have liked to make in the 1990s. The writing was developed by Beban while in exile in London, together with the artist Hrvoje Horvatić then companion of Breda Beban, and with the participation of the writer and film critic Chris Darke.
This booklet “inaugurates” a new series, libraryline, which from now on will contain the editorial production of Trieste Contemporanea aimed at publishing unpublished writings by artists, or excellent “observers” of contemporary art, Italian or European (therefore also often, as in this case, in the first Italian translation).
The unpublished Moneystains comes out in two editions: in English (language in which it was written by Breda Beban) and in Italian translation. The book is edited by Dubravka Šantolić Cherubini, who is also responsible for the Italian translation, while the publisher chosen to support the Trieste committee is the Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb, with which it is already foreseen that in 2023 the Croatian translation. The graphic is signed by Giulia Lantier.

Breda Beban, photo by Ferdy Carabott

Breda Beban (1952 – 2012) was an artist, filmmaker and curator/creative producer whose work deals with contemporary notions of subjectivity and emotion that occur on the margins of big stories about geography, politics and love. Breda Beban’s films and photographs are recognized as unique expressions of intimacy, vulnerability and authenticity.
Born in Novi Sad, ex-Yugoslavia in 1952, Breda Beban was raised in Macedonia and Croatia. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Starting her career as a painter and performance artist, she began to work with film, video, and photography after meeting her partner and collaborator Hrvoje Horvatić in the mid-eighties. Exiled together in 1991 after outbreak of the war in former Yugoslavia, they travelled from place to place before eventually settling in London, where they continued their collaboration until Horvatić’s untimely death in 1997.
Working independently and/or in collaboration with other artists or filmmaker, she has fashioned a range of productions that have been exhibited at major museums of contemporary art in Europe and the U.S.
Breda Beban lived in London and Sheffield, where she was Professor of Media Arts at Sheffield Hallam University. She passed away in 2012, leaving various projects uncompleted.