Self-titled,
series of self-portraits, 2022-
01. Live Works
“If the portrait once promised access to a person’s private and intimate, Karlo Štefanek’s ongoing series Self-titled starts from that very promise. Since 2022, Štefanek has worked across self-portraiture through image, text, performance, and installation to test how a self is built, circulated, contested, and sometimes, withdrawn and erased. The series’ title reads as a sort of placeholder, positioning Karlo at once as creator, muse, and creation.
The series began in 2022 during Štefanek’s branding classes at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, through exercises for building an alter ego[1]. Here he turned inward, toward the self – the subject he “knew best,” but could not ever fully grasp. Štefanek answers branding’s demand to package identity into something legible and sellable by over-fulfilling that demand until it breaks. He “directs” his own image through “mechanisms of mystification and autofiction,”[2] borrowing techniques mass media has long used to crowd public space.
In the photographic works, he shows two different “times” at once: the moment the photo is captured, and what happens to it later, when the image is printed and becomes a surface for further work. Printed images, anchored in the vernacular intimacy of the selfie, are subjected to manual annotation and analogue manipulation: drawings, inscriptions, collage, paint, and more. In an interview for Vizkultura, Štefanek frames collage’s logic, its capacity to split and reassemble, as aligned with the layered, fluid conditions of identity.[3] For the artist, these works on paper become a kind of performance, not only through the making process but through their circulation and encounter with the public. What matters is not simply that the hand intervenes, but how the gesture declares independence from photography as a medium, from its often strict, fixed sense of the image.
In my conversation with Karlo, he desrcibed Self-titled as a “playground where masquerade becomes ordinary, reflections become unrecognizable, style is lost, and behavior bends to weather.” Identity, in this case, behaves like climate: pervasive, volatile, and impossible to opt out of. This climate symbolism becomes literal when the work exits the studio and enters the city. In Missing (2023-)[4], Štefanek distributes his image through posters and leaflets that declare the artist as “missing”, even as the work makes him hyper-visible. Iterations of this work have moved through Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Zagreb, Venice, sites where cultural and historical promises and exclusions are especially concentrated, and the piece recalibrates itself according to the “spatial, political, and social coordinates” of each space it inhabits. In Venice, for example,[5] the work sharpened into a critique of institutional fatigue during the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Štefanek was there to deliver the final two works from the Self-titled triptych for the Croatian Pavilion, as part of a group exhibition By the Means at Hand initiated by Vlatka Horvat. The occasion also reactivated the work’s core question: what does it mean to “be present” inside an institution he often addresses through guerrilla interventions that critique those same systems. Unlike earlier iterations, where posters were placed anonymously across the city, in Venice he distributed the leaflets directly, hand-to-hand. Phrases like “last seen questioning the value of participation” and “missing an audience,” printed in Italian and English, alluded to the exhaustion of cultural workers. Similar questions of visibility, how it is granted, withheld, and monetized, returned in a later work The Artist Has Died (2024)[6], in which Štefanek publicly declared his own death through an obituary in a Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji list.
Štefanek describes turning the self-portrait series into live work in pursuit of a more direct, public, and intimate relationship with an audience. In Against Self (2024)[7], performed during the Perforations in Zagreb, he becomes both protester and the protested-against, while in Ah, I’m always so temporary (2025)[8], he strips the action down to near-zero. Exposed, motionless, he becomes a living sculpture, marked by a temporary tattoo of text across his back. The work adopts the visual of rest only to undo its presumed innocence: “The position of rest mimics the position of rape. The position of care mimics the position of conquest.” Here the body is staged as contested terrain, refusing productivity, refusing performance, yet made available all the same: readable, handleable by the gaze, even ownable. “Safety for the viewer is always danger for the subject,” the tattoo continues, naming an asymmetry that structures spectatorship itself. And while the work is rooted in the artist’s personal experience of sexual assault, it pushes beyond autobiography toward the vulnerability artists accept whenever they surrender their bodies (of work) in front of an audience. Each performance thus becomes a fresh exposure, and each exposure reopens the possibility of pain and violation.[9]
The quintessential part of the series is text: manifesto, chant, letter, memes. It appears sporadically throughout Self-titled (on flags, in trams, on bodies, on picket signs, etc.), but it is most vividly used in what the author calls his text drawings. These works replace the image with language, pushing against the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, and insisting that words can say what the visual cannot. In my conversation with Karlo, he described these text drawings as portraits, as much as the selfies he takes.
In the end, Self-titled returns the portrait’s “promise” back to the person who is looking. If portraiture is always preemptively defined by framing, posing, conventions, power relations, etc., Štefanek doesn’t try to purify the form of those conditions. He makes them visible, and lets them do their work. The self here is assembled in the act of viewing, in the assumptions the viewer brings, in the speed with which an image is judged, desired, consumed, or dismissed. By doing so, Štefanek doesn’t offer his viewer a personal narrative so sealed in specificity that it becomes unrecognizable to anyone else. Instead, he insists on building a self that is real but not fully accessible, a self built through everybody else, an alter ego that goes by the name Karlo Štefanek.,,
The series began in 2022 during Štefanek’s branding classes at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, through exercises for building an alter ego[1]. Here he turned inward, toward the self – the subject he “knew best,” but could not ever fully grasp. Štefanek answers branding’s demand to package identity into something legible and sellable by over-fulfilling that demand until it breaks. He “directs” his own image through “mechanisms of mystification and autofiction,”[2] borrowing techniques mass media has long used to crowd public space.
In the photographic works, he shows two different “times” at once: the moment the photo is captured, and what happens to it later, when the image is printed and becomes a surface for further work. Printed images, anchored in the vernacular intimacy of the selfie, are subjected to manual annotation and analogue manipulation: drawings, inscriptions, collage, paint, and more. In an interview for Vizkultura, Štefanek frames collage’s logic, its capacity to split and reassemble, as aligned with the layered, fluid conditions of identity.[3] For the artist, these works on paper become a kind of performance, not only through the making process but through their circulation and encounter with the public. What matters is not simply that the hand intervenes, but how the gesture declares independence from photography as a medium, from its often strict, fixed sense of the image.
In my conversation with Karlo, he desrcibed Self-titled as a “playground where masquerade becomes ordinary, reflections become unrecognizable, style is lost, and behavior bends to weather.” Identity, in this case, behaves like climate: pervasive, volatile, and impossible to opt out of. This climate symbolism becomes literal when the work exits the studio and enters the city. In Missing (2023-)[4], Štefanek distributes his image through posters and leaflets that declare the artist as “missing”, even as the work makes him hyper-visible. Iterations of this work have moved through Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Zagreb, Venice, sites where cultural and historical promises and exclusions are especially concentrated, and the piece recalibrates itself according to the “spatial, political, and social coordinates” of each space it inhabits. In Venice, for example,[5] the work sharpened into a critique of institutional fatigue during the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Štefanek was there to deliver the final two works from the Self-titled triptych for the Croatian Pavilion, as part of a group exhibition By the Means at Hand initiated by Vlatka Horvat. The occasion also reactivated the work’s core question: what does it mean to “be present” inside an institution he often addresses through guerrilla interventions that critique those same systems. Unlike earlier iterations, where posters were placed anonymously across the city, in Venice he distributed the leaflets directly, hand-to-hand. Phrases like “last seen questioning the value of participation” and “missing an audience,” printed in Italian and English, alluded to the exhaustion of cultural workers. Similar questions of visibility, how it is granted, withheld, and monetized, returned in a later work The Artist Has Died (2024)[6], in which Štefanek publicly declared his own death through an obituary in a Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji list.
Štefanek describes turning the self-portrait series into live work in pursuit of a more direct, public, and intimate relationship with an audience. In Against Self (2024)[7], performed during the Perforations in Zagreb, he becomes both protester and the protested-against, while in Ah, I’m always so temporary (2025)[8], he strips the action down to near-zero. Exposed, motionless, he becomes a living sculpture, marked by a temporary tattoo of text across his back. The work adopts the visual of rest only to undo its presumed innocence: “The position of rest mimics the position of rape. The position of care mimics the position of conquest.” Here the body is staged as contested terrain, refusing productivity, refusing performance, yet made available all the same: readable, handleable by the gaze, even ownable. “Safety for the viewer is always danger for the subject,” the tattoo continues, naming an asymmetry that structures spectatorship itself. And while the work is rooted in the artist’s personal experience of sexual assault, it pushes beyond autobiography toward the vulnerability artists accept whenever they surrender their bodies (of work) in front of an audience. Each performance thus becomes a fresh exposure, and each exposure reopens the possibility of pain and violation.[9]
The quintessential part of the series is text: manifesto, chant, letter, memes. It appears sporadically throughout Self-titled (on flags, in trams, on bodies, on picket signs, etc.), but it is most vividly used in what the author calls his text drawings. These works replace the image with language, pushing against the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, and insisting that words can say what the visual cannot. In my conversation with Karlo, he described these text drawings as portraits, as much as the selfies he takes.
In the end, Self-titled returns the portrait’s “promise” back to the person who is looking. If portraiture is always preemptively defined by framing, posing, conventions, power relations, etc., Štefanek doesn’t try to purify the form of those conditions. He makes them visible, and lets them do their work. The self here is assembled in the act of viewing, in the assumptions the viewer brings, in the speed with which an image is judged, desired, consumed, or dismissed. By doing so, Štefanek doesn’t offer his viewer a personal narrative so sealed in specificity that it becomes unrecognizable to anyone else. Instead, he insists on building a self that is real but not fully accessible, a self built through everybody else, an alter ego that goes by the name Karlo Štefanek.,,
– from text Ongoing by Mia Laura Jurčić, 2026
[1] Marjanić, S. (2025) Pokušavam napasti vlastiti identitet sa svih strana - Plesna scena. Available at: https://www.plesnascena.hr/index.php?p=article&id=2935
[2] Jovanović, A. (2025) Karlo Štefanek on Fragility, Brutality, and Queer Identity in His Art - Vogue Adria. Available at: https://vogueadria.com/karlo-stefanek-intervju/
[3] Rupnik, L. (2025) Umjetnost ne bi trebala biti elitistička - Vizkultura. Available at: https://vizkultura.hr/karlo-stefanek-intervju/
[4] This is a Domino Project, (2025) Q-Izlog 2025: Karlo Štefanek. Available at: https://thisisadominoproject.org/en/q-izlog-2025-karlo-stefanek/
[2] Jovanović, A. (2025) Karlo Štefanek on Fragility, Brutality, and Queer Identity in His Art - Vogue Adria. Available at: https://vogueadria.com/karlo-stefanek-intervju/
[3] Rupnik, L. (2025) Umjetnost ne bi trebala biti elitistička - Vizkultura. Available at: https://vizkultura.hr/karlo-stefanek-intervju/
[4] This is a Domino Project, (2025) Q-Izlog 2025: Karlo Štefanek. Available at: https://thisisadominoproject.org/en/q-izlog-2025-karlo-stefanek/
[5] Metafora, (2025) Mladi hrvatski umjetnici na Biennale del Vesuvio - Metafora. Available at: https://www.metafora.hr/mladi-hrvatski-umjetnici-na-biennale-del-vesuvio/ [6] Ribarić, L. (2025) U Jutarnjem sam objavio svoju osmrtnicu, iako nisam umro. Pitate se zašto? Ovo je moj razlog - Jutarnji list. Available at: https://www.jutarnji.hr/kultura/art/u-jutarnjem-sam-objavio-svoju-osmrtnicu-iako-nisam-umro-pitate-se-zasto-ovo-je-moj-razlog-15554110
[7] Vržina, J. (2024) Najhrvatskija noć performansa dosad - H-alter. Available at: https://h-alter.org/kultura/najhrvatskija-noc-performansa-do-sad/
[7] Vržina, J. (2024) Najhrvatskija noć performansa dosad - H-alter. Available at: https://h-alter.org/kultura/najhrvatskija-noc-performansa-do-sad/
[8] Thomas, M. (2025) Karlo štefanek brings bold solo exhibition KARLO ŠTEFANEK WAS HERE to Dubrovnik - The Dubrovnik Times. Available at: https://www.thedubrovniktimes.com/lifestyle/culture/item/18503-karlo-stefanek-brings-bold-solo-exhibition-karlo-stefanek-was-here-to-dubrovnik
[9] This is a Domino Project, (2025) Perforacije Buenos Aires 2025. Available at: https://thisisadominoproject.org/en/perforacije-buenos-aires-2025/
[9] This is a Domino Project, (2025) Perforacije Buenos Aires 2025. Available at: https://thisisadominoproject.org/en/perforacije-buenos-aires-2025/