Bernd Behr, Amoy Gardens, 2003/07
David Brognon / Stéphanie Rollin, Famous People Have No Stories, seit 2013
Annalisa Cannito, Silence is Violence (Schweigen ist Gewalt), 2017
Olga Chernysheva. Compossibilities, 2013
Edith Dekyndt, Provisory Object 03, 2004
James T. Hong, Cuta Ways Of Jiang Chun Gen – Forward And Back Again, 2012
Milomir Kovecivic, Sarajevo dans le coeur de Paris (Sarajevo im Herzen von Paris), 2007-2008
Dorit Margreiter, Gescheitertes Modell eines geschlossenen Systems, 2006
Susanne Kriemann, Pechblende (Prologue), 2016
Vesna Pavlovic, Fabrics of Socialism. Fototeka, 2013/2017
Dan Perjovschi, Ohne Titel, 2017
Lia Perjovschi, The Biennial, the Project, the Bunker, the Curators’ Keywords, and the Museum, 2017
Alexander Sokurow, Spiritual Voices, 1995
The Errorists (Hilary Koob-Sassen, Andreas Köhler & collaborators), Faith In Infrastructure, Part 1 & 2, 2007 – 2009
Jan Peter E.R. Sonntag, Baghdad, 2017
Infertile Grounds (Unfruchtbare Böden), 2009

TITO'S BUNKER

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
Courtesy, unless otherwise noted: the artist

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Taysir Batniji
b. 1966 in Gaza, lives and works in both France and Palestine
Me 2, 2003
Video, 02’04’’
Courtesy: the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg and Beirut

A jerky self-portrait dancing to a Gloria Gaynor song (“I Will Survive“) heard during a street carnival. The artist spins around himself in his apartment.
This video, made at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, is a superimposition of two simultaneous shots. The artist turns while looking at himself turning. Taysir Batniji has chosen this impromptu movement as a personnal reaction against the war and its violent, even immoral, representation by the media.
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Bernd Behr
b. 1979 in Hamburg, lives in London
Amoy Gardens, 2003/07
35mm slide projection with sounds, 34 slides

This slide and sound work associates Le Corbusier’s treatise on “Exact Air” in La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City, 1933), which propogates total control, hygiene, and manipulation of air through filtering, drying, humidification, and desinfection, with photographs of Amoy Gardens: a densely settled, middle-class housing estate in Hong Kong that was considered the epicenter of the SARS epidemic in 2002 due to dilapidated water pipes and malfunctioning ventilation systems.
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David Brognon / Stéphanie Rollin
D.B.: b. 1978 in Messancy; S.R.: b. 1980 in Luxemburg; live in Paris and Luxemburg
Famous People Have No Stories (Marie de Nazareth, Pierre Cardin, Robert Schuman) , since 2013
Series of 16 inkjet prints, each 45 x 35 cm, framed
Courtesy: The Artists & Galerie Albert Baronian, Brussels

The series Famous People Have No Stories compiles photographs of the palms of hands found in sculptures and monuments of famous personalities like Jeanne d’Arc, Charles de Gaulle, Théodore Géricault, Harry Houdini, François Mauriac, among others. Here, the gaze is directed toward the so-called life line—at times clearly delineated and in other cases faded by time—which supposedly fortells one’s personal fate. The photographs allow absolutely no conclusions to be drawn about the identity of the respective prominent individual whose plams we behold here. The construction, selection, randomness, and the disappearance of the historical canon all manifest in these hands, as does the fiction of salvation and survival.
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Annalisa Cannito

*1984 in Acqui Terme, lives in Acqui Terme
Silence is Violence, 2017
light box
Co-produced by: Association Biennial of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

In this work, Annalisa Cannito references a propaganda placard that stood in the 1940’s on the grounds of the Hanford Site, a nuclear facility in Washington State established in 1943 in connection with the so called “Manhattan Project”. The Manhattan Project was a top-secret atomic bomb project by the USA that had been started during the Second World War. Even well into the Cold War era, the Hanford Site served the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Among other things, the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was built here. Today, the Hanford Site is one of the western hemisphere’s most severely radioactively contaminated areas. During construction of the facility, both workers and residents were bound to maintain strictest secrecy about the project, under threat of prosecution. Both the construction of the nuclear bunker in Konjic as well as of the neighbouring armaments factory also stood under a comparable rule of secrecy. In the late 1940’s, due to increasing tensions with the Soviet Union, Tito launched the concept of “the people’s national defence”. This was accompanied by the construction of large-scale military facilities and defence structures, which were made possible in no small part by massive support from the USA.
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Olga Chernysheva
b. 1962 in Moscow, lives in Moscow
Compossibilities, 2013
Color photography, 80 x 120 cm
Courtesy: the artist and Diehl Gallery, Berlin

The photograph depicts pigeons occupying an otherwise unidentifiable, cassette-like architectural element. Its structure recalls the modernistic ideals of mass housing and its dogma of efficient space utilisation. The title derives from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ concept of compossibility, which states that different things, essences and substances are possible in their coexistence.
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Edith Dekyndt
b. 1960 in Ypern, lives in Tournai and Berlin
Provisory Object 03, 2004
Video, 3’31’’, no sound
Courtesy: the artist and ARGOS centre for art and media, Brussels

Edith Dekyndt’s video shows the membrane of a soap bubble, in this case stretched between the thumb and the finger of a hand. Depending on the way the light falls, colors and shapes appear in the reflections from its surface; once in a while a drop falls down, and after two minutes the “bubble” finally bursts.
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Jan Peter Hammer
*1970 in Berlin, lives in Berlin
The Dig, 2017
Video, 21:55’
Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe

In 1977, Bulgarian archaeologist Vetsislav Gergov discovered a 6500 year old settlement from the early Bronze Age  in Telish, a district in Pleven, Bulgaria. the archaeological site contained, among other things, a small, cylindrical object whose function is unknown. Gergov believes that the object represents an alien spaceship. In Bulgaria, “treasure hunting” has become a popular occupation, due to the large amounts of archaeological artefacts to be found. The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought a far-reaching deindustrialisation and unemployment in its wake. The availability of affordable metal detectors  as well as easy access to western auction houses have turned archaeological looting into one of the few existing resources for an independent income. With its hills furrowed by recent excavations, rising amidst the ruins of former steelworks from the Soviet era, shuttered factories and an abandoned aerospace centre, a peculiar temporality, an unfinished history, seems to inhere in contemporary Bulgaria, These places that once symbolised progress, seem so very alien in an economy consisting of barter and scrap trade that one might think they had been built by another species—like the Yugoslav monuments of the Second World War, called Spomeniks, that are making the rounds in the internet as supposed proof of the presence of extraterrestrials on earth. (after a text by Jan Peter Hammer).
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James T. Hong
b. 1970 in Minnesota, lives in USA and Taiwan
Cutaways of Jiang Chun Gen – Forward and Back Again, 2012
HD video, 10’

This short documentary film is the portrait of a Chinese farmer who, in 1942 at the age of two years, was exposed to Japanese biological weapons. His closest family members died from their infections, but he has been living with open wounds on his feet for seventy years.
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Milomir Kovacevic (genannt/called Strasni)
*1961 in Cajnice (today Bosnia and Herzegowina), lives in Paris
Sarajevo dans le coeur de Paris (Sarajevo in the heart of Paris), 2007-2008
series of 32 bw photographs, handdrawn texts attached to each, framed each 40 x 50 cm

Photographer Milomir Kovacevic, born in today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina, and who has been living for decades in Paris, is mainly known for his photographs of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996). The exhibition, by contrast, presents an excerpt from a continuing series that approaches memory from the perspective of exile. Kovacevic asks former residents of Sarajevo who, like himself, have immigrated to Paris, to make available an object that represents to them their most significant connection with Sarajevo. Kovacevic photographs these objects in a neutral manner and supplied with a personal text by the respective owner. In this way, a deeply subjective, photographically recorded and linguistically commented selection of objects, a kind of Musée Imaginaire, whose open-ended collection is based on many-voiced selection processes.
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Susanne Kriemann
b. 1972 in Erlangen, lives in Berlin
Pechblende (Prologue), 2016
4 photographs, ca. 180 x 200 cm each

Based on her studies on the invisibility of radioactivity, both real and political, Susanne Kriemann developed various versions of autoradiograms in collaboration with scientists at the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the National Archives (Washington, DC), and the Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin). Autoradiograms are a special kind of photography in which photosensitive material is exposed through actual radioactive objects. This cameraless exposure gives rise to an indexical yet highly abstract picture in which the now iconic photographs of an atomic mushroom and its radiant light linger as a haunting image. In Pechblende (Prologue), Kriemann combines her own autoradiograms and photograms with archival images from various sources, including aerial pictures and scientific photographs evidencing the radioactive contamination of animals, plants, and people.
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Dorit Margreiter
b. 1976 in Vienna, lives in Vienna
Gescheitertes Modell eines geschlossenen Systems (Failed Model of a Closed System), 2006
Series of slides, slide projection below a glass cover

In the slide series Gescheitertes Modell eines geschlossenen Systems (Failed Model of a Closed System), Dorit Margreiter explores the American experiment of an artificially created biosphere in the early 1990s that attempted survival indepenently of our atmosphere but failed: celebrated by the media and shattered by its artificiality in real life. The projector itself becomes an object under observation, which opens up a space of illusion through projection and already captures that which is being shown as a small image on the pane. (Source: gfzk.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/dorit.pdf)
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Sir Eduardo Paolozzi
b. 1924 in Leith, d. 2005 in London
Cloud Atomic Laboratory, 1971
Series of eight prints
© Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Courtesy of the British Council Collection. Licensed by VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

This eight-part graphic print series of sixteen pictures is based on paintings that were in turn modeled after photographs published in magazines, books, and newspapers from the 1950s to 1970s. They reference dreams of machines and mechanistic scientific discourses of the postwar period or Cold War—such as space travel, robotics, atomic energy, the living machine, and behaviorism—along with related dilemmas.
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Vesna Pavlovic
b. 1970 in Serbia and Montenegro, lives in Nashville, USA
Fabrics of Socialism: Fototeka, 2013
Slide projection on curtain

The project Fabrics of Socialism, which is being shown in a variety of forms and formats, is based on the official archive of Josip Broz Tito in the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade. It was established for the purpose of recording the private side of the career and travels of the former president of Yugoslavia. Following the images from this semi-public archive, Vesna Pavlovi? probes the monumentality of the socialist vision in a country that sank into decades of civil war shortly after the death of the author and spearhead of this vision. The version of Fabrics of Socialism to be seen in this exhibition, which bears the additional title Fototeka (phototheque), comprises eighty black-and-white slides from the Tito archive. They are projected onto a grey curtain, so that the images break up into folds. The historic documents—and thereby the history itself—appear fragile, slightly distorted and phantom-like: as if they were ghosts of socialism and the Cold War.
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Dan Perjovschi
*1961 in Sibiu, lives in Sibiu
Untitled, 2017
Series of overpainted postcards

Following the Pentagon, the Palace of the Parliament, initiated by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau?escu in 1983 and known as the “House of the People”, is the world’s second-largest building in terms of surface area, and the symbol of the brutal Ceau?escu regime. It was completed only after the revolution of 1989 and at first used exclusively as the parliament building. Then, in 2004, the first museum of contemporary art was quartered in the gigantic building. From the outset, Dan und Lia Perjovschi were among the committed opponents of the close association of government and art at this fraught location, which is now celebrated on postcards as the city’s landmark. Dan Perjovschi has collected all Bucharest postcards in circulation on which the “House of the People” appears, painted over the unwelcome building in black, and thereby transformed it in a certain sense into a menacing shadow. The act of cancelling out, so it seems, produces its own monsters… The question of how to deal with the representations and testimonials to a painful past remains ambivalent. In the case of Ceau?escu’s “House of the People”, as with Tito’s bunker, the question also arises as to how far art is instrumentalised to exorcise the evil spirits that haunt certain places.
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Lia Perjovschi
*1961 in Sibiu, lives in Sibiu
The biennial, the project, the bunker, the curators´keywords, and the museum, 2017
series of mind maps

In her work, consisting of diverse mind-maps, the artist takes the curators’ key concepts as her point of departure: the theme is a bunker (Tito’s nuclear bunker in Konjic for 350 representatives of the political and military elite); Sarajevo (the siege of 1992-1996); various symptoms of the 20th and 21st centuries; a collection of works and a museum in the bunker; a world filled with crises such as global warming in the absence of a back-up planet. The artist expands these aspects along her own questions with respect to security in a continually changing world, with respect to elites in a society based on equality (Communism), and with respect to a utopia devolving into a dystopia.
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Jorge Ribalta
*1963 in Barcelona, lives in Barcelona
Water, Wind and Wire, 2016
Series of gelatin silver prints, jeweils / each 30 x 36 cm
Co-produced Association Biennial of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

As part of the 4th Project-Biennial in Konjic, Jorge Ribalta was invited to negotiate this project on a meta-level: in the form of a photographic documentation of the processes of transformation of a historic nuclear bunker from the Cold War era, via the present model of a biennial, into a museum of contemporary art. The photographs that have arisen to date were taken during two stays in Konjic; on the one hand during the run-up, and on the other during the installation and opening of the 4th Project-Biennial. For the exhibition in Stuttgart, Ribalta has divided his photographs into four chapters. The first, titled Water, Wind and Wire, breaks with the notion of a bunker as an autonomous system by tracing the paths of water and air supply as well as the wires to the external world. The second chapter, titled Bunker/Museum, shows moments of the arising of the 4th Project Biennial. The third chapter, Phantom Public, focuses on the official visitors to the opening, the press representatives and those persons responsible for the smooth operation of this event. The fourth chapter, Visit Konjic, then examines the bunker, the Biennial and Konjic along tourism-related structures: from the curators’ on-site explorations to a tour of the bunker by the London School of Business.
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Alexander Sokurow
b. 1951 in Podorvikha, Irkutsk Oblast, lives in St. Petersburg
Spiritual Voices, 1995
Video, 327’

Between 1994 and 1995, about the same time to the siege of Sarajevo, Alexander Sokurov spent several months with the Russian troops in Afghanistan. The resulting five-part film focuses the anonymous life of the soldiers at this disastrous base between ambiguity, threat and deadly boredom. The film takes almost six hours and thus challenges the format exhibition. The problem of duration is almost in the room ... it will be hard to cope with.
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The Errorists (Hilary Koob-Sassen, Andreas Köhler & collaborators)
HKS: *1975 in Boston, lives in London
Faith In Infrastructure, Part 1 & 2, 2007 – 2009
Video, 15’13’’

Faith In Infrastructure is a multi-part project consisting of a manifesto, live performances and a video. The video is based on a collage of music and vocal pieces situated between psychedelic and punk, texts, sculptures and paintings by Hilary Koob-Sassen and Andreas Köhler. Climate change, the abstractions and cynicism of algorithm-based finance capitalism, bio- and genome policies, the abscesses of real-estate speculation and the privatisation of infrastructure are negotiated in a sustained delirium between master plan and loss of control, utopia and dystopia.
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Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag
*1965 in Lübeck, lives in Berlin
Baghdad, 2017
Print on Tyveck, 250 x 182 cm

The work Baghdad references a postage stamp of the Republic of Iraq from 1982 showing the likeness of Josip Broz Tito, one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. The stamp was printed to commemorate the 7th conference of the non-aligned nations, which was to be held in Baghdad. Ultimately, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi head of state at the time, was forced to cancel the conference due to the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Instead, the conference met a few months later in New Delhi. The stamp is part of an entire series devoted to commemorating a specific historical event that in this form never occurred. Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag has greatly enlarged a digital photo of the Tito stamp and printed it on a Tyvek fabric—a registered trademark of the DuPont company—is a paper-like material consisting of polyethylene fibres that is generally used to pack paintings or in the manufacture of protective clothing for persons working in sterile rooms, laboratories or on contaminated ground.
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Sandra Vitaljic
b. 1972 in Pula, lives in Zagreb
Slana, Croatia from the series Infertile Grounds, 2009
Photograph

Landscapes in the photographs from the Infertile Grounds series are marked by trauma, historical events, and human experience. Woods, fields, and rivers are part of folk tales and myths, but have also become part of a rhetoric legitimizing political systems and ideologies. Names like Jasenovac and Bleiburg went beyond their topographical referentiality and, each time they were mentioned, included different possible interpretations and contextualizations. The artist was interested in places that political rhetoric had used copiously in inflammatory speeches during the 1990s, places of institutionalized memory as well as those that had never been marked by a single memorial plaque. As after World War II, so after the war in the former Yugoslavia, the politics of memory labeled what needed remembering and suppressed what was desirable to forget.
In the Infertile Grounds series, the artist endeavors to create a place of memory within the space of the photograph, an alternative memento that is not created by ideology, but rather by the need to open up the space of remembrance for victims who are never going to acquire their own space in the official culture of memory.

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Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart