Led by the desire for a fresh and impartial view, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb entrusted a major survey of Croatian contemporary art to an outside curator. Roxana Marcoci from MOMA New York approached her task conscientiously, following Croatian art on the international scene and making 120 studio visits across the country, before eventually settling upon thirty-five artists. As the initial frame of the exhibition grew over time, it spread beyond the museum walls to other cultural institutions, public venues and urban space. The broad overall concept of temporality suggested by Here Tomorrow and the generous scale of the show made possible the inclusion of both established and emerging artists.

Belonging to the latter group, Ivan Bura used the Paromlin, an abandoned flour mill in the centre of town, as a site for his performance and installation entitled Silicone Valley (2002). Referring to the traditional Croatian custom of planting a pot of wheat for Christmas to ensure wealth and prosperity for the following year, the artist grew wheat inside dozens of transparent silicone moulds of his own face. On a nearby overgrown rooftop, wearing the hooded black attire of the Grim Reaper, Bura steadily mowed the long grass with a scythe, before scattering genetically modified seeds. His menacing performance sent a message of warning about the threat to local traditions and lifestyles posed by an advancing global monoculture.

From another perspective, the numerous Croatian artists living and working abroad, notably in Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, and New York, clearly benefit from the internationalism of global culture. Their strong presence bestowed extra glamour and trendiness on the show. In this context, the Germany-based artist Iva Matija Bitanga offers a compelling description of contemporary nomadic lifestyles. Her video Gradually (2001-2) is a hectic travelogue that induces a disturbing sense of present-day transitory existence. By strapping a video camera to her hand and letting it swing naturally, she created a juddering and neurotic record of her pan-European odyssey. In the dark gallery space of the Glyptotheke, it was paired with In Between (2002), a work by the Zagreb-based British artist Nicole Hewitt, whose inclusion in Croatian art is another sign of 'disappearing borders.' Her film treats objects discarded on Zagreb's annual 'day of oversized rubbish collection' as elements for an animated story that reveals the stockpiling of trash as transgressive urban poetry.

A catchy community based project, Velvet Underground (2002) was also intended as a captivating exhibit. The artist Igor Grubic made repeated visits to Lepoglava Prison, the most notorious jail in the country, to ask dangerous convicts about their childhood. He also got them to pose in their cells disguised in velvet cuddly-toy outfits. Transcripts of the prisoners' stories about favourite games, early memories and future fantasies, as well as their vital statistics: initials, age, crime and sentence, were shown together with the incongruous portraits. This project uses psychotherapeutic techniques to probe the meaning of crime and punishment. Furthermore, it talks profoundly about social and artistic responsibility.

Slightly overlooked by this survey were the many artists working within the conventional media of painting and sculpture. This seems to have worked to the advantage of artists in whose work the influence of the trans-historical avant-garde could be more easily traced. In this sense relevant is the environment Training Paintings for Beautiful Places (2002) by David Maljkovic. Cynically, it pokes fun at the conventional painter's readiness to accommodate the wishes of the bourgeois purchaser. He presents three identical decorative paintings above three identical fireplaces against a burgundy wall, a sarcastic allusion to the middle class living room. There is a certain ambivalence in the fact that Maljkovic himself has a successful career as a commercial painter, and here he becomes a link between the highly praised avant-garde and the denigrated 'mainstream'.

Ivan Kožaric, an avant-garde veteran now in his ninth decade and fresh from participation in Dokumenta XI, enjoys an exceptional status in contemporary Croatian art. On this occasion he created a site-specific work incorporating his own metal sculpture from 1958, which is on permanent display in the museum grounds. Underneath it he parked two old Renault 4 cars, one considerably older than the other, together with some wooden crates and other belongings. Installation under the Sphere (1958-2002) is a masterly intervention which ironises the basic idea of temporality, and more specifically, the indeterminacy of critical interpretation over time. By interfering in his own celebrated mid-century sculpture, Kožaric disrupts the modernist canon and signals the enduring contemporaneity of his practice.

Here Tomorrow brought together many engaging works and projects dealing with issues as diverse as institutional critique, war memories, globalisation, travel, fashion and activism. Promising a 'critical assessment of the most influential practices in contemporary Croatian art', the show successfully spotlighted some favoured trends and placed them more firmly within international art discourse.