AustLit

'The image is strong and striking. It is of a young woman; her face unsmiling, her gaze proud and ever so lightly mocking — as if she knows that you are ascending the stain to a contemporary art gallery and that you are both wishing to find works there that will confront you with the new and the audacious, while at the same time you are smugly confident that nothing you will see or experience will thrill you or astonish you. 'Astonish me,' Sergei Diaghilev demanded of the young Jean Cocteau. On this day in the European spring of 2019, climbing the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art in New Zagreb and entering the exhibition space, you start off jaded; but you are astonished; and you are shocked. And you are shamed. The defiant young girl, her image in black and white, across a canvas that is over four metres tall and two metres wide, is staring down at you. Across her image is scrawled an ugly, misspelt graffiti. ' (Introduction)