SERBIA

VIDEO ART FROM SERBIA

Curator: Branislav Dimitrijevic

Artists: APSOLUTNO, Miodrag Krkobabic, Era Milivojevic, Vladimir Nikolic, Tanja Ostojic, Vesna Pavlovic, Nikola Pilipovic, Marija Vauda, SKART, Zoran Todorovic And Milica Tomic

ELEMENTS OF NORMALITY Video-documents and video-performances from Serbia in the 1990s.

Exhibition is organized by invitation of Vrede van Utrecht in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade

The exhibition is based upon the project On Normality. Art in Serbia 1989-2001 curated by Branislava Andjelkovic, Branislav Dimitrijevic and Dejan Sretenovic and organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in September/November 2005. This project presented a period of very vibrant artistic activities in the most difficult and controversial political context in Serbia under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic. During that period, Serbia was politically, culturally and psychologically split into the two parallel worlds: the dominating world of warmongering nationalist ideology, and the marginalized world of opponents to this political hegemony. The exhibition shows artistic projects which directly or indirectly reflected political, economical , cultural and everyday climate in this country, and the position on the crossroads between longing to participate in the international artistic currents and keeping local specificities, between direct political engagement and disillusioned escapism, between the tragic and the humorous, between modest and pretensions, between theoretical and intuitive, between participation and isolation... This exhibition marked a sense of urgency to re-think the position of free artistic practices in hostile ideological circumstances, and to critically re-evaluate a general climate of disillusionment and (in)ability to face responsibility for atrocious events that brought the whole region to disaster and Serbia in particular to its regretful image internationally. It was not the intention of this show to give a face- lift to this image, but to open up the whole context in which artistic and political issues intermingled, and to offer a case-study in which remarkable works of art reflect troubled and turbulent collective/personalattitudes and forms.

Although based on it, Elements of Normality is not a “short version” of that exhibition, but a new curatorial proposition which investigates individual responses to such a troubled social climate and offers a new perspective on cultural, anthropological and psychological frameworks a free individual was facing and reflecting in a work of art. The chosen medium (with just one exception of photographs by Vesna Pavlovic) of this exhibition is video because it was the medium closest to documenting the relation between the “desert of the Real” and defiant or escapist artistic imagination. Therefore most of the works are positioned on the thin and blurred line between a video-document and video-performance, between observation and intervention in the cultural and social field. Some of the videos document and reflect a certain anthropological-artistic research and intervention in the social sphere (APSOLUTNO, Krkobabic, Todorovic, Skart), some are reflections on cultural-political issues (Nikolic, Pavlovic, Tomic) and some are individual and idiosyncratic responses to the psychological “burdens” of the times (Milivojevic, Ostojic, Pilipovic/Vauda).

The show is accompanied by the English edition of the catalogue On Normality published by MOCA Belgrade, with illustrations of most important artistic projects in Serbia in the 1990s and with critical texts by Branislava Andjelkovic, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Dejan Sretenovic, Vladimir Tupanjac and Kristijan Lukic. The catalogue features a comprehensive chronology of political, artistic and pop-cultural phenomena compiled by Aleksandra Mircic and interviews with leading artists from Kosovo. The catalogue will be available for sale during the exhibition in Utrecht .

Branislav Dimitrijevic - Curator
Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade