Land of Human Rights is a project dealing with the status quo of human rights in Europe seen from an artistic perspective. Over a period of three years, arts organizations in Central Europe and the Balkans are collaborating to develop a program of human rights issues through the means of art. The planned activities – exhibitions inside and outside the gallery space, poster campaigns, media projects, film programs, theoretical discourse etc – are supposed to reach a broad audience. They are designed to make people aware of the following fact: “In many respects the observance of human rights is not guaranteed ‘in front of our doors’ too!”

Trafó Gallery in Budapest is currently working together with Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska. The project Airways is an attempt to create a symbolic public space that manifests the divergence between the idea of the Hungarian nation state and the actual Hungarian society at present. For her Budapest project Rajkowska invited two groups on the same flightseeing tour. One includes the representatives of right wing groups that aim to constrict the social space in a radical, nationalist way, while the other comprises foreign residents and ethnic minorities, who are, albeit members of actual Hungarian society, regularly ousted from it. Rajkowska’s works deal with spaces of social contact and the conflicts and communities forming these: they suggest simple yet far from obvious encounters.

Here for Land of Human Rights; and its partners:

rotor association for contemporary art, Graz
University of J.E. Purkyně, Ústí nad Labem
riesa efau | Motorenhalle, Dresden
Trafó Gallery, Budapest
Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana
g - mk | galerija miroslav kraljević, Zagreb

Curator and art historian Dunja Blazevic, currently director of the SCCA in Sarajevo, started in 1981 a legendary monthly TV show called TV Gallery, which was broadcast monthly on the Yugoslav TV network until 1991. TV Gallery was a highly influential platform for interdisciplinary, socially engaged artistic and curatorial practice in the Western Balkans, being an unrivaled example of a public TV concept and art’s place within it.

TV Gallery is now turned into an exhibition, highlighting the TV show’s innovative ideas about democratization, participation and cultural production. Today, the preserved tapes of this show demonstrate how such radical experiments would be unacceptable on public television, where they would be considered as elitist, noncommercial and uninteresting both in form and content:

A paradox ensues that the TV shows aiming at mass media public today can return only in a ‘closed’, ‘elitist’ space of a white cube gallery. In the world of Big Brother and programmed social oblivion, ‘obsolete’ media space of a gallery reaffirms itself as one of the rare spaces for freedom and experiment, a place of reminiscence that social and media reality are not unambiguously marked with politics or economy. Although socio-political context enabled these shows, nothing would have happened without initiative, creativity, and courage of editors, redactors, directors and artists that produced the shows and had clear ideas about theory and ideology of media, art and personal action.

TV Gallery is part of the project Political practices of (post)Yugoslav Art, a long term project in which four independent cultural organizations collaborate in multidisciplinary research, mapping and analyzing of the historical, social and economic conditions that have shaped artistic practices in the Western Balkans.

Here for the 4 partners: WHW (Zagreb), kuda.org (Novi Sad), SCCA/pro.ba (Sarajevo) and Prelom Kolektiv (Belgrade).

Here for Political practices of (post)Yugoslav Art.

The Balkans Project is Provisions’ ongoing investigation about the impact of the arts in a region emerging from centuries of social upheaval. On a recent tour of the region one of team members, John Feffer, sent two “Postcards” from the trip. The first is from Sarajevo, largest city in Bosnia-Herzegovina:

During the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, the inhabitants of the Bosnian capital received thousands of cans of food from the international community. The shipments helped keep the city alive. So it is perhaps not surprising that Bosnian artist Nebojsa Seric Soba would construct a Monument to the International Community in the form of a huge, round tin of canned beef. More

And another one from Ljubljana, Slovenia

Look out for a new blog all about the Balkans Project and the fascinating people we have been meeting.