The Art Pavilion in Zagreb presents a selection of works by contemporary Irish artist Dorothy Cross created over the past three decades curated by Leonida Kovač.

The exhibition is held at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, where, located between the Egyptian and prehistoric collections, it further draws connections between our space and time, distant histories and geographies.

The backbone of the exhibition Kinship / Srodstvo is the artist’s recently completed project Kinship – Home , her multi-year effort to return the mummified body of an ancient Egyptian, which was owned by the University of Cork, home to Cairo. By returning the body of the deceased to where looters and antiquities dealers desecrated his grave, Dorothy Cross points to the history of colonialism woven into the cultural history of the West, and at the same time pays tribute to the thousands of refugees for whom the Mediterranean Sea is now a tomb. Dorothy Cross regularly emphasizes that she understands art as seeing things as they have not yet been seen. Such an understanding of art necessarily implies the deconstruction of dominant epistemological paradigms, or the decolonization of knowledge. Her works are articulated as thinking images that destabilize established patterns, including the binary opposition between inanimate matter and living human beings. The sculptures, installations, photographs, films, and operatic performances that Dorothy Cross has directed in specific settings, relate deep geological time to the brief moment of human presence on this planet. In her work, a journey through cultural history requires a perception of multidimensional relationships, a genealogical understanding that necessarily presupposes a departure from the tradition of anthropocentrism. Her works can also be understood as a statement about the substantial and inseparable imbuing of the human with the non-human, about the encounter of species in an affective event beyond spatial and temporal coordinates. They echo the theme of the “oceanic feeling” – the feeling of boundlessness in being one with the entirety of the external world.

28 November 2025 at 12 noon – Dorothy Cross: artist talk