Tuesday, March 31, 1:00 PM (EDT) / 7:00 PM (CET) / 6:00 PM (WET)

Nick Tobier + Zagreb based sculptor Vladimir Novak, winner of the 2025 Radoslav Putar Award, will discuss Novak’s work that mines our relationships between city space and sculptural space, both site-specifically and generally. The discussion will focus on a number of his projects, such as transforming the tall skinny volume of a former light bulb testing facility in Croatia’s capital into a sonic and auditory beacon, which plays back the tempos of daily life; or Novak’s installations and objects that challenge our assumptions of weight, mass, and the roles of spectators. Through material with specific associations of weight and mass – from monumental steel and straw constructions to working with light and space – Vladimir Novak’s practice engages contemporary dialogues on the roles of performances without performers, coincidental audiences, and performances by audiences.

This program will be streamed online via Zoom at this link. This virtual talk will also be live-streamed at RU’s space at 360 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY for visitors who wish to attend in person.

Vladimir Novak is the recipient of the 2025 Radoslav Putar Award. Vladimir Novak is a Zagreb-based artist whose practice investigates the limits of sculpture as a medium through the use of objects, (day)light, and sound installations, with a particular focus on space, media, and affective intensities. Through iterative processes, he seeks to dismantle established media boundaries by exploring the visible and the invisible, engaging with concepts such as body–mass, object–installation, stasis–movement, and light–shadow. His recent projects In Visible, Calm, and Day for a Day, employ radically minimalist and subtle interventions that emphasize processuality and the entanglement of artworks with natural and urban rhythms, their transformation across media, and their physical and socio-ecological resonances. Operating at the threshold of perception, within the ambivalence between malfunction and artistic act, his work challenges the perceptions of time and attention, questioning the boundary between aesthetic experience and banal everyday events.

Nick Tobier studied history, sculpture and landscape architecture, and has worked at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Storefront for Art & Architecture in NYC, and as a designer with the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation/ Bronx Division. Nick’s focus as artist-designer-educator is on the social lives of public places, both in built structures and events, from bus stops to kitchens and boulevards. His work is part of the 2025 Venice Biennial, the 2024 Split Biennial, and has been seen at the Smithsonian, The Queens Museum, NY, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, the Prague Quadrennial, the London Festival of Games at Somerset House in London, and upcoming projects at KRAK Center for Contemporary Art in Bihać, Bosnia. Nick has received support for his work from the NEA , The Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of Visual Art and the Harpo Foundation, and writes for the Trieste-based magazine Juliet on artists, galleries, and cultural centers in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.