In “Degenerates, Monsters, and Traitors (1573),” Kristian Kožul takes a baroque scalpel to history, ideology, and trauma, assembling a theatrical, hyper-stylized meditation on power, violence, and historical recurrence. The solo exhibition at Trotoar Gallery, Zagreb, reimagines the 1573 Croatian-Slovenian peasant revolt through an unsettling, surrealist lens — one that feels alarmingly close to the world outside the gallery walls.
Kožul is not new to grappling with the symbolic architectures of authority. In earlier exhibitions like “Forensic Folklore: The Archipelago” (2018) and “Intercisus” (2021), he mined forensic aesthetics and Catholic iconography to probe the uneasy intersection of spectacle, memory, and the silence of representation. This new body of work marks an expansion of his material vocabulary — introducing ceramics for the first time — while remaining firmly rooted in an aesthetic realm: a decadent, fetishized collapse of function and ornamentation, shot through with critique and allegory.
The historical anchor here is the 1573 Croatian-Slovenian peasant uprising, led by Matija Gubec (the revolt is in fact also known as Gubec’s Rebellion) and swiftly crushed by Baron Ferenc Tahy and the nobility after just twelve days. For Kožul, the story is less about medieval grievance than it is a cipher for present-day collapse. “We’re living through something eerily similar today,” he notes. “It’s unsettling… but irony is a coping mechanism.” In the summer of 2025, that sentiment feels viscerally apt: as wars rage, governments radicalize, and systemic violence is normalized, Kožul’s grotesque yet oddly seductive sculptures speak a language we recognize all too well.
His figures — assembled from ceramic, glass, feathers, metal, and plastic — are mythic and monstrous, somewhere between reliquary and effigy. Severed heads atop poles recall medieval martyrdom, while baroque ornamentation flirts with the absurd. Beer bottles, military standards, baby walkers — objects of care, celebration, or control — become charged relics in a fragmented, nonlinear narrative. For example, in one work, a gnarled ceramic bishop figure (in fact titled Bishop, 2025) presides over the gallery like a tyrant in a child’s dream.
What emerges is not didactic account of rebellion but a speculative fiction — an atmosphere in which the line between villain and victim is continually blurred. “Every side thinks they’re the victim,” Kožul reminds us. The show refuses easy binaries, preferring to dwell in the ambiguity where ideology festers: in the absurd, almost comic horror of power rendered ornamental. That’s where Kožul thrives — between the beautiful and the abject, the sacred and the kitsch.
Crucially, “Degenerates, Monsters, and Traitors (1573)” also interrogates how history is framed. Under Yugoslavia, Gubec’s rebellion could be seen as proto-socialist struggle. Later, the same could have been rebranded as nationalist resistance — despite nationalism being anachronistic to the sixteenth century. Kožul points out that the peasants’ original demand was “not to be raped or murdered” — a desire for fundamental dignity that transcends ideology. The reframing of such events reflects broader cultural manipulations of suffering and heroism, particularly in regions like Croatia, where the past is persistently revised to suit the politics of the present.
If Kožul’s aesthetic appears outlandishly theatrical, it is precisely because the realities he’s reflecting are themselves grotesque. He quotes Catholic martyrdom and socialist realism in equal measure, but undermines both with a perverse, speculative baroque. His monsters are not just symbols of the past — they are analogues for our own moment, standing in for authoritarian populism, algorithmic enclosures, and the silent violence of normalization.
There is no redemptive arc here, no neat resolution. Instead, the show leaves us in an uneasy space. In doing so, it offers not escape but confrontation. Kožul doesn’t tell us what to think, but demands we reckon with the question at the heart of his work: Who gets to decide who the monster is?
