Ivan Hrkaš, "Intima #3 / Intimacy #3"
Ivan Hrkaš is a photographer in search of the subtle threads of the ordinary life through which an intimate relationship between two people is materialized. On the photographs from the series Intimacy, the space is a part of the partners’ living organism. It is the extension of the senses rather than being just a setting or an autonomous subject. By entering into the intimate space of others, the artist also tests the projected phantasies of the observer, the voayeristic tendencies, prejudices and clichees that orient the way we perceive the others that we suppose to be different from us. Moreover, instead of keeping a neutral position, the artist himself projects his own inner emotional world into the photographic space. The emotional transference between the artist and his subjects, between the observer and the living space of others is of key importance for the problem of the authenticity of photography dealing with the ordinary life and behaviour. In Ivan Hrkaš’s work, this problem is approached through a conceptual research into the anthropology of intimacy and interpersonal trust.
Branka Vujanović
Nemanja Nikolic, „Panic Book“
Nemanja Nikolic’s new work "Panic Book" is based on the intersection of previous artist's interests in the medium of drawing, animation and film and his approach which is specific due to use, combination and recontextualization of different contents and visual references into new narratives. The current series of several hundreds of drawings was made on the pages of books on social and political thought in the former Yugoslavia. Fleeing, mass panic and fear scenes from various films of Alfred Hitchcock, that take place on the background of theoretical reflection on mechanisms of socialism and the development of Yugoslav society become subtle metaphorical comments on new social - political circumstances in the former common state. Nemanja's work raises number of issues and topics on post-conflict and transitional reality, from the trends of historical revisionism, to the position of a common individual and his/her everyday existence in the deterioration of economic and other crises we are facing as societies...
Miroslav Karić
Nemanja Nikolic’s new work "Panic Book" is based on the intersection of previous artist's interests in the medium of drawing, animation and film and his approach which is specific due to use, combination and recontextualization of different contents and visual references into new narratives. The current series of several hundreds of drawings was made on the pages of books on social and political thought in the former Yugoslavia. Fleeing, mass panic and fear scenes from various films of Alfred Hitchcock, that take place on the background of theoretical reflection on mechanisms of socialism and the development of Yugoslav society become subtle metaphorical comments on new social - political circumstances in the former common state. Nemanja's work raises number of issues and topics on post-conflict and transitional reality, from the trends of historical revisionism, to the position of a common individual and his/her everyday existence in the deterioration of economic and other crises we are facing as societies...
Miroslav Karić
Gjorgje Jovanovik, “Our democracy...”
In the 90’s, post-yugoslav societies witnessed the creation of a new type of platform for collective action: activist choirs. These choirs represent an inventive contemporary form of expressing protest against and disapproval with local political conditions. Searching for a way for expressing their opinion through songs, humor, poetry and various multimedia experiments, the choirs have created rich new forms of public performances. An important characteristic of these performances is the use of public space, which confronts (involuntary) audiences with opinionated messages and artistic acts - thus stirring up conventional ideas and formats of choir singing. These modified choir practices can be seen as a way of responding to the crises of contemporary post-yugoslav politics - collective public singing as a conscious, political act. (Svetlana Slapšak)
The author started working with choirs in 2013, and has had previous practical experience as a performer in an activist choir in Skopje. “Our democracy...” is a video work produced in collaboration with the Belgrade-based choir PROBA. In his recent choir collaborations the artist is creating a stage where he could speak up about different political issues and social conditions by orchestrating different artistic elements - lyrics, music, singing, choreography- into one artwork. “Our democracy...” reflects the position of the younger generation in the region and their position in society, e.g. their struggles with a corrupt political systems or their demands for civil society and human dignity. The lyrics in the song are describing the everyday life of this transitional generation, their expectations and disappointments, and their battle and hope for a better society. Choir singing is used as a way of commenting as a collective, representing the ability of a society of multiple voices to still aim towards a common goal.
Elena Veljanovska
In the 90’s, post-yugoslav societies witnessed the creation of a new type of platform for collective action: activist choirs. These choirs represent an inventive contemporary form of expressing protest against and disapproval with local political conditions. Searching for a way for expressing their opinion through songs, humor, poetry and various multimedia experiments, the choirs have created rich new forms of public performances. An important characteristic of these performances is the use of public space, which confronts (involuntary) audiences with opinionated messages and artistic acts - thus stirring up conventional ideas and formats of choir singing. These modified choir practices can be seen as a way of responding to the crises of contemporary post-yugoslav politics - collective public singing as a conscious, political act. (Svetlana Slapšak)
The author started working with choirs in 2013, and has had previous practical experience as a performer in an activist choir in Skopje. “Our democracy...” is a video work produced in collaboration with the Belgrade-based choir PROBA. In his recent choir collaborations the artist is creating a stage where he could speak up about different political issues and social conditions by orchestrating different artistic elements - lyrics, music, singing, choreography- into one artwork. “Our democracy...” reflects the position of the younger generation in the region and their position in society, e.g. their struggles with a corrupt political systems or their demands for civil society and human dignity. The lyrics in the song are describing the everyday life of this transitional generation, their expectations and disappointments, and their battle and hope for a better society. Choir singing is used as a way of commenting as a collective, representing the ability of a society of multiple voices to still aim towards a common goal.
Elena Veljanovska
Driton Selmani, "Tell me where I'm from?"
While doing a research on a wide topics related with identity and human belonging I went through a lot of situations related with my geographical background. Topics I went through such as: war, emigration, evolving nationality and lately political barriers with visa requests or struggle opening a bank account in the UK because, my country is not on the country list pushed me forward to start a research and project on the topic concerning where I come from. I asked most of the MA students at the University to draw my country map without looking at any map or information about the country location and the end result of the drawings brought me another supporting argument to attach to the work. My home country suffers to get the International recognition in order to become a full member of the United Nations so the current political situation creates a very difficult atmosphere both in inner and outer reflection of the people living there. The country functions as a ghost place or an island isolated and disconnected from Europe even though it is in it. To give a significance approach to this I asked my Mother to embroider the map of Europe leaving out my country and replace it with the colors of the surrounding seas by doing this I have created a parallel map which responds to the current reality and questions it: If the place where I come from exists or not!
Driton Selmani
While doing a research on a wide topics related with identity and human belonging I went through a lot of situations related with my geographical background. Topics I went through such as: war, emigration, evolving nationality and lately political barriers with visa requests or struggle opening a bank account in the UK because, my country is not on the country list pushed me forward to start a research and project on the topic concerning where I come from. I asked most of the MA students at the University to draw my country map without looking at any map or information about the country location and the end result of the drawings brought me another supporting argument to attach to the work. My home country suffers to get the International recognition in order to become a full member of the United Nations so the current political situation creates a very difficult atmosphere both in inner and outer reflection of the people living there. The country functions as a ghost place or an island isolated and disconnected from Europe even though it is in it. To give a significance approach to this I asked my Mother to embroider the map of Europe leaving out my country and replace it with the colors of the surrounding seas by doing this I have created a parallel map which responds to the current reality and questions it: If the place where I come from exists or not!
Driton Selmani
Jovana Vujanović, „La Fine“
The starting point of Jovana Vujanović’s work “La Fine“ is actually the artist’s childhood photograph – its innocent smile succeeds in touching spectator delicately. Like the treasure itself, the photograph is laid in a small vitreous sarcophagus and covered by hand-made dwarf figures recreating the moaning scene from Disney’s animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The nostalgic sound of music box mechanism increases the lament over the childhood smile. Synchronizing and nicely smoothing up the ontological differences between the private photo and the notorious scene, the artist comes up with a melancholic narrative which becomes a place of facing the individual sadness (end of childhood) and the collective mourn (end of life). The sarcophagus protects the interior body tissue from dissolving the fairytale atmosphere, implying a move away from the outer world. Simultaneously it protects the inside from penetrating or ironical gaze, subtly transforming the spectator, transferring him into the zones of the sublime and beautiful, waking up his inner noble, ungratified lust for the superb and forever lost childhood world. The period of early artist's childhood, coincides to period of gradual disintegration within the boundaries of Yugoslav state. It is this process of destruction that is inherent to the title of artist's work - „La fine“. By „lasting freeze“ of her own childhood, artist has developed idea of “collective mnemosina on loving country” in terms of archetype narrative, or to say more precisely – in terms or fairytale's narrative.
Ljiljana Karadzić
The starting point of Jovana Vujanović’s work “La Fine“ is actually the artist’s childhood photograph – its innocent smile succeeds in touching spectator delicately. Like the treasure itself, the photograph is laid in a small vitreous sarcophagus and covered by hand-made dwarf figures recreating the moaning scene from Disney’s animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The nostalgic sound of music box mechanism increases the lament over the childhood smile. Synchronizing and nicely smoothing up the ontological differences between the private photo and the notorious scene, the artist comes up with a melancholic narrative which becomes a place of facing the individual sadness (end of childhood) and the collective mourn (end of life). The sarcophagus protects the interior body tissue from dissolving the fairytale atmosphere, implying a move away from the outer world. Simultaneously it protects the inside from penetrating or ironical gaze, subtly transforming the spectator, transferring him into the zones of the sublime and beautiful, waking up his inner noble, ungratified lust for the superb and forever lost childhood world. The period of early artist's childhood, coincides to period of gradual disintegration within the boundaries of Yugoslav state. It is this process of destruction that is inherent to the title of artist's work - „La fine“. By „lasting freeze“ of her own childhood, artist has developed idea of “collective mnemosina on loving country” in terms of archetype narrative, or to say more precisely – in terms or fairytale's narrative.
Ljiljana Karadzić
Maja Smrekar, "HYPNAGOGIA 0.X"
… Take a hare running from one corner of a room to another. I think this hare can achieve more for the political development of the world than a human being. …
(An interview with Willoughby Sharp, 1969; as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man – Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993, p. 82)
Hypnagogia refers to the state of mind between sleep and wakefulness. Maja Smrekar applies this phenomena as a metaphor to explore and evaluate her own childhood memories that were consciously suppressed over the years of adulthood. The perception of one's own personal history is often blurred and uncertain, and hence open to different interpretations in relation to a broader socio-political circumstances. Parallel to the structural changes in Yugoslavia and Slovenia in late 1980s and early 1990s (and also because of them) the lives of majority of population changed dramatically. The sense of safety, embodied by the state policy of social welfare, and economic equality was replaced by stratification and (virtual) competitiveness. The artist revisited places of her childhood and youth memories, places where she doesn't belong any more, and staged scenes that reflect her present perception of their meanings. Images of rabbits, abandoned and vacant spaces, and uncanny solitude serve as a trigger for emotional memories. The motifs are often characterised by uncomfortable and bizarre situations that suggest anxiety, melancholia and uncertainty. For Maja Smrekar Hypnagogia 0.X represents the demystification of her personal traumas, fears and losses caused by the overall situation of her immediate environment; deterioration of her own family and the lost sense of home stand parallel to the decay of certain period in local, regional and global history. The installation, consisting of photographs and videos, represent idealised world of naïve childhood which is - accompanied by the increasing discomfort and alienation - symbolised by kitschy iconography of mass media as a crucial identification element of the growing up period.
Miha Colner
… Take a hare running from one corner of a room to another. I think this hare can achieve more for the political development of the world than a human being. …
(An interview with Willoughby Sharp, 1969; as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man – Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993, p. 82)
Hypnagogia refers to the state of mind between sleep and wakefulness. Maja Smrekar applies this phenomena as a metaphor to explore and evaluate her own childhood memories that were consciously suppressed over the years of adulthood. The perception of one's own personal history is often blurred and uncertain, and hence open to different interpretations in relation to a broader socio-political circumstances. Parallel to the structural changes in Yugoslavia and Slovenia in late 1980s and early 1990s (and also because of them) the lives of majority of population changed dramatically. The sense of safety, embodied by the state policy of social welfare, and economic equality was replaced by stratification and (virtual) competitiveness. The artist revisited places of her childhood and youth memories, places where she doesn't belong any more, and staged scenes that reflect her present perception of their meanings. Images of rabbits, abandoned and vacant spaces, and uncanny solitude serve as a trigger for emotional memories. The motifs are often characterised by uncomfortable and bizarre situations that suggest anxiety, melancholia and uncertainty. For Maja Smrekar Hypnagogia 0.X represents the demystification of her personal traumas, fears and losses caused by the overall situation of her immediate environment; deterioration of her own family and the lost sense of home stand parallel to the decay of certain period in local, regional and global history. The installation, consisting of photographs and videos, represent idealised world of naïve childhood which is - accompanied by the increasing discomfort and alienation - symbolised by kitschy iconography of mass media as a crucial identification element of the growing up period.
Miha Colner
Tea Hatadi, "Censorship of Happiness: in front of the wall"
‘Censorship of Happiness’ started in 2012 when Tea Hatadi invited some twenty artists based in Zagreb to face the video camera and talk about the emotions and states they experienced through (or related to) their artistic practice. The sub plot of this project was a documentary-existentialist study about the possible sense of belonging to a specific community, the conditions of art or cultural production, within the geographically specific and culturally defined artistic community in Zagreb. Her colleagues’ responses ranged from descriptions of specific works to short accounts of turning points that altered the artists’ established views of their practice, and life and art in general. But, as much as the title of the work indicates that Hatadi’s work focuses on the issue of happiness in the current social reality, her formal approach, concealing the identities of her informants, reveals the opposite. Happiness is, first of all, a tool of the dominant ideology of contemporary society flagged in the vast array of self-help manuals and unbearably light and joyous pop songs. As the prominent philosopher Renata Salecl puts it: “ Ideology of choice (the twin of the ideology of happiness as we are all in control of our own happiness) can compel us and drive us to the wrong path burdening the individual with the idea that he is the only master of its own prosperity and his own life and that ideology brings a little to the possible change of society in general (1).
It is, moreover, pointless to address happiness without taking into consideration the social sample as a parameter and being continually aware of its many different facets, as they are all interdependent. How we live our lives does not, unfortunately, depend on us alone. Circumstances, good or bad, constantly intervene. A person close to us dies. A person not so close to us carries on living. All these things affect how we live. (2)
Therefore, one understands Hatadi’s strategy to talk about happiness from the position of the censorship of happiness as the common law, while analysing the social mechanisms surrounding it.
In her quest for samples of ‘happiness’ in her own and other people minds, for the exhibition Ex-ordinary, Tea Hatadi has broadened her artistic approach and returned to the art of drawing. Possibly because drawing transmits the emotion behind the mere components of an encounter, and the viewer’s gaze merges with the gaze of the sitter through the ongoing reenactment of gesture and translation of the observational. All of the artists involved in this project, along with Hatadi, are clearly present – although depicted from behind. The drawings of their physical outlines are accompanied by a drawing of a wall of the house that delineated their mental landscapes during the preparatory residency for this exhibition. The installation includes the sound recording of their individual comments on happiness and the practice of art. Within this transfer of individual processes into the collective, lies the most important element of Hatadi’s work. The interweaving of personal fragments of thoughts about practice and the potential of a collective activity goes beyond the discourse about the happiness of the creative act.
Ivana Meštrov
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1. Renata Salecl, Tyrany of Choice (translated from Croatian edition by the author of a present text, Tiranija izbora, Fraktura, Zagreb, 2012, 20).
2. Quotation from Tariq Ali taken from the Facebook wall of Jelena Gr (http://books.google.hr/books/about/The_Stone_Woman.html?id=iVQfwypi7fkC&redir_esc=y, 8/9/2013)
‘Censorship of Happiness’ started in 2012 when Tea Hatadi invited some twenty artists based in Zagreb to face the video camera and talk about the emotions and states they experienced through (or related to) their artistic practice. The sub plot of this project was a documentary-existentialist study about the possible sense of belonging to a specific community, the conditions of art or cultural production, within the geographically specific and culturally defined artistic community in Zagreb. Her colleagues’ responses ranged from descriptions of specific works to short accounts of turning points that altered the artists’ established views of their practice, and life and art in general. But, as much as the title of the work indicates that Hatadi’s work focuses on the issue of happiness in the current social reality, her formal approach, concealing the identities of her informants, reveals the opposite. Happiness is, first of all, a tool of the dominant ideology of contemporary society flagged in the vast array of self-help manuals and unbearably light and joyous pop songs. As the prominent philosopher Renata Salecl puts it: “ Ideology of choice (the twin of the ideology of happiness as we are all in control of our own happiness) can compel us and drive us to the wrong path burdening the individual with the idea that he is the only master of its own prosperity and his own life and that ideology brings a little to the possible change of society in general (1).
It is, moreover, pointless to address happiness without taking into consideration the social sample as a parameter and being continually aware of its many different facets, as they are all interdependent. How we live our lives does not, unfortunately, depend on us alone. Circumstances, good or bad, constantly intervene. A person close to us dies. A person not so close to us carries on living. All these things affect how we live. (2)
Therefore, one understands Hatadi’s strategy to talk about happiness from the position of the censorship of happiness as the common law, while analysing the social mechanisms surrounding it.
In her quest for samples of ‘happiness’ in her own and other people minds, for the exhibition Ex-ordinary, Tea Hatadi has broadened her artistic approach and returned to the art of drawing. Possibly because drawing transmits the emotion behind the mere components of an encounter, and the viewer’s gaze merges with the gaze of the sitter through the ongoing reenactment of gesture and translation of the observational. All of the artists involved in this project, along with Hatadi, are clearly present – although depicted from behind. The drawings of their physical outlines are accompanied by a drawing of a wall of the house that delineated their mental landscapes during the preparatory residency for this exhibition. The installation includes the sound recording of their individual comments on happiness and the practice of art. Within this transfer of individual processes into the collective, lies the most important element of Hatadi’s work. The interweaving of personal fragments of thoughts about practice and the potential of a collective activity goes beyond the discourse about the happiness of the creative act.
Ivana Meštrov
------
1. Renata Salecl, Tyrany of Choice (translated from Croatian edition by the author of a present text, Tiranija izbora, Fraktura, Zagreb, 2012, 20).
2. Quotation from Tariq Ali taken from the Facebook wall of Jelena Gr (http://books.google.hr/books/about/The_Stone_Woman.html?id=iVQfwypi7fkC&redir_esc=y, 8/9/2013)