Kim Mikasović
A Gentle Sleep, for the Day Will Fade
Kim Mikasović’s work A Gentle Sleep, for the Day Will Fade takes as its starting point the history of the building that houses the Gallery of Fine Arts in Split, a site that carries layers of often suppressed collective memories. The Gallery of Fine Arts once served as Split’s Old Hospital and, at various points in its history, was also home to an institution for abandoned children — the so-called foundling home. The history of this place bears witness to social circumstances in which the most vulnerable members of the community were left to a system that was unable, and often lacked the capacity, to provide them with adequate care. Particularly harrowing is the fact that during the period when the foundling home operated, child mortality was almost one hundred percent, primarily due to hunger, disease, and inadequate care.
Mikasović does not approach this archival fact merely as a historical record, but translates it into a contemporary visual language. Through symbolic representations of children, engraved into the fragile and transparent surface of glass, the artist opens up a space between document and memory. Glass becomes a material with multiple meanings: at once solid and fragile, visible and almost invisible, enduring yet always vulnerable to disappearance. Inscribed into it are children whose lives, in historical records, have been reduced to numbers, statistics, or administrative facts.
The work therefore extends beyond the historical context of the foundling home, establishing a clear connection with the present. Even today, children without adequate parental care face the consequences of a system that is often overburdened, institutionally sluggish, and insufficiently funded. Overcrowded homes, inadequate facilities, a lack of professional staff, low pay and excessive workloads, as well as lengthy and administratively complex adoption and guardianship procedures, create circumstances in which one of society’s most vulnerable groups once again finds itself on the margins.
A Gentle Sleep, for the Day Will Fade is the result of Kim Mikasović’s years-long artistic research. Through this body of work, the artist explores complex, multilayered, and interconnected relationships between space, the body, the institution, memory, and systems of healthcare and social care. She approaches archival material both analytically and intuitively. Rather than reconstructing the past as a closed historical fact, she reactivates it and brings it into dialogue with the present moment. The historical document becomes a starting point for creating a sensory and emotional relationship with what it leaves out: the experiences and lives that have remained almost invisible behind the statistics.
In this sense, A Gentle Sleep, for the Day Will Fade is not simply a work about the past of a particular place. It is a work about the responsibility of a community towards those who depend on its care, about the ways in which society remembers its own failures, and about how easily historical injustices can be repeated in new forms. The fragile traces of children in glass thus become, simultaneously, a memorial, a warning, and an invitation to confront systems that are meant to protect their most vulnerable members, yet continue to leave them unseen.
BIO
Kim Mikasović was born in 2001 in Split and lives in Kaštel Lukšić. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Arts Academy in Split in 2025, in the class of Professor Neli Ružić.
In 2023, she presented her first solo exhibition, Premijere 88, at Loggia / Zlatna vrata Centre for Culture and Lifelong Learning in Split. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Rastavi, sastavi, nastavi – Module 2 and Module 3 at the Gallery of Fine Arts in 2024 and 2025; Rad, tekst, kontekst – Privremenost in Split in 2023 and at Gallery SC in Zagreb in 2024; New Horizons at Gallery Flora in Dubrovnik in 2024; and the international contemporary art exhibition Spazio e Luci nelle Arti at Villa Farsetti in Santa Maria di Sala, Italy, in 2024. She is the winner of the 8th edition of the A4 competition for young artists and curators.
