Alenka Gregoric

IRWIN
Šejla Kamerić
Vladimir Nikolić
Marjetica Potrč
Tobias Putrih
Mladen Stilinović
Milica Tomić

In the section curated by her, Alenka Gregorić (Ljubljana) gathers together artistic positions that focus on the very specific historical and political reality of a region. With the aid of videos, installations, graphical works and objects by artists from ex-Yugoslavia, her contribution discusses the complex relations between contemporary art and a radical political and social upheaval after 1989. The project analyses the language of politics and art of the socialist past as well as the question of the relationship between mass media and neoliberalism that is becoming consolidated. Finally, the exhibition also touches on the question as to the position of Eastern European artists on an art market dominated by the West.

Works and Projects

IRWIN, Namepickers, 1998
3 photographs
In cooperation with: Marina Abramovič, photograph: Bojan Brecelj

Šejla Kamerić, Bosnian Girl, 2003
B/W-photography, dimensions variable, Photography: Tarik Samarah

Piece of graffiti by an unknown Dutch soldier on the wall of an army base in Potocari, Srebrenica, 1994/95. Troops of the Royal Dutch army, as part of the UN protection force (UNPROFOR) stationed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were responsible for protecting the Srebrenica security zone.

Vladimir Nikolić, Death Anniversary, 2004
Video installation, 4 min.

Nikolić’s new work addresses the question as to tradition and artistic heritage in modern art. The video is the result of a trip by the artist to the rural regions of Montenegro. Here he looks for a singer willing to a sing a dirge to Marcel Duchamp at the famous concept artist’s grave in Rouen (France). He selects singers in three villages, first explaining to them the significance of Duchamp’s work for the art of the twentieth century. One singer, finally, whose singing reflects the artist’s conception of Duchamp most accurately, travels with him to France. The dirge that she sings at the grave was written in co-operation with the artist. Based on a local artistic tradition in danger of dying out, Nikolić’s video takes an ironical view of the self-perception of modern art, that once proclaimed its independence of history and tradition. Now it has become part of this tradition itself.
Text: Jee-sook Beck

Marjetica Potrč, Temporary Territories, 2003
Ink on paper, Courtesy: Max Protetch Gallery, New York

Imagine particles as dots moving around in space, but always retaining their individuality. When I travel, I appreciate my locality – my stasis – more than ever. The more I travel, the more I find a balance between the foreign landscape and the places of my imagination. The more instability and uncertainty exists around me, the more I appreciate the security of my own intellectual world. Can parallel worlds exist in close physical proximity to each other, but mentally kilometres part – as is apparently the case with the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Palestinian villages? Is a small utopia – one that belongs to me alone as an individual – a credible utopia? Peter Handke once wrote: “We live on illusions. Without illusions we would never do anything.” I imagine that the mind is more credible than physical space. After all, it does have the ability to move in space.
Text: Marjetica Potrč

Tobias Putrih, QR-rd (Study on Buckminster Fuller’s Cloud Nine project), Installation, 2006

Fuller’s study for the Cloud Nine Project shows a black-and-white photo of a lake surrounded by snow-covered mountains. Two spheres, drawn with mathematical precision, are floating above the mountains. The caption reads: “Spherical constructions at least 0,6 mile in diameter represent airborne cities, which float high above ground like balloons filled with hot air. City by measuring one mile in diameter with only one degree temperature difference between inside and outside of the sphere would be able to float above the ground together with its few thousands inhabitants and whole infrastructure.” These floating structures can only be kept in the air by means of constant conditions inside, for example strict control of weight, metabolism and reproduction. I find it hard, therefore, to conceive Fuller’s Cloud Nine Project but in the sense of the ultimate totalitarian form of organisation: individual bodies have ceased to exist here. The city becomes a single social organism. The utopian aspect of the American Dream thus comes to a close in the senseless, colourless fiction of the airborne city.
Text: Tobias Putrih

Mladen Stilinović, Parole, 1973-1983, Installation

Words play a key role in Mladen Stilinović’s art. His works are rarely purely “visual”, and even works with no written text often refer to linguistic structures: either their logic is based on linguistic patterns, or they are visual representations of such patterns (e.g. works based on plays on words). At the same time, Stilinović’s works demonstrate that the material representation of a text (for example the typography, colour of the writing, its material base, the context in which the written word appears, etc.) has tremendous influence on its meaning.
Text: Igor Zabel

Milica Tomić, I Am Milica Tomić, 1999, Videoinstallation, 10 min.

Tomić looks into the question of her identity “as a Serb and orthodox Christian”. She can only perceive this politically and collectively prescribed identity as problematic and ambivalent. With paradoxical rhetoric, that asserts and denies identity at the same time, she opposes the demand to be part of a “healthy body of the people” in order to reveal the trauma that underlies this construction of identity.