Brooklyn’s Dumbo Arts Center is showing Nebojsa Seric-Shoba’s amazing photography project, Battlefields, curated by Josh Altman.

Made between 1999 to 2009, Shoba’s documentations of actual battlefields, call into question the autonomy of place and the disparities that exist between historical events and the geographic locations in which they occur. Apart from the occasional historic marker or didactic memorial plaque, little visual evidence remains to distinguish one site from another, a disconnect that evokes the transient nature of history, the arbitrary lines of the battlefield and the universality of the theatres of war.

Conscripted to fight in defense of his hometown of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, (1992-1995), Shoba served the majority of his military mandate digging trenches amidst the bodies that littered the battlefield. It is from these wartime experiences that the artist developed a profound sense of distrust for a political machine that saw neighbors taking aim at neighbors, firing across seemingly arbitrary lines of demarcation. Eventually this experience led him to the sober realization that the history of the human race can be seen as a history of conflicts, the majority of which are destined to be forgotten, buried beneath the surface of history. 

The artist’s subsequent travels found him photographing numerous battlefields, including those at Waterloo, Gallipoli, Troy, Verdun, Normandy, Istanbul, Gettysburg and Kursk. The majority of these sites now see few visitors, and those that do serve primarily as tourist attractions for the morbidly-inclined, visiting only briefly in an attempt to capture the remnants of a history long since departed.

The exhibition features The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 (2009), also known as The Battle of Long Island, which was the first major battle of the American Revolutionary War. Tellingly, the current riverside park lying opposite the Dumbo Arts Center building, marks the actual point of retreat of George Washington’s volunteer militia, which resulted in the British burning  nearly a quarter of New York City.

As competing social, cultural, and linguistic incarnations make it nearly impossible to lay claim to any fixed idea of national history or identity, the relationship between history and place has become a struggle for the possession of the past. In reframing our history through the focused lens of these battlefields, the artist asks us to consider them less as fixed landscapes, and more as part of a living history, with the many memories and points of view that such a history evokes.

Read Shoba’s comments in an online roundtable organized by Provisions Library’s Balkans Project.

Image: From upper left to bottom: Battle for Britain, Auschwitz, Verdun, Troy, Sarajevo, Normandy, Mostar, Leningrad, Gettysburg, Gernika, Gallipoli, Borodino

EFA Project Space
323 W 39 Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York

Tuesday March 2, 2010 | 6:30pm

A Video Serenade:
Selected works by artists from Norway, Serbia, Russia, and the UK

Recent works selected by ArtVideoExchange (AVE) and Format Network.

A VIDEO SERENADE presents a wide range of contemporary video, from the performative to the personal to the fictive and the documentary. The program aims to reflect the unique mix of themes and approaches to video as exemplified by the artists supported by these two groups.

AVE – Serbia
Program selection by Bojana Romi?

Big Bang / Bojana Romi? / 2009 / 2:30 min.
Never Gonna Give You Up / Goran Micevski / 2006 / 4:00 min.
Exhaustion of Europe / Jovan ?eki? / 2005 / 8:07 min.
Clay Pigeon / Milos Tomi?, 2005 / 6:41 min.
Atomic Watch / Nenad Kosti? / 2006 / 1:13 min.
FPS (First Person Shooters or Frames Per Second) / Wim Janssen / 2006 / 3:08 min.

Format Network, UK
Song Archive / Yvonne Buchheim / 2009 / 5:00 min.
Weightless / Matt White / 2008 / 7:55 min.
A Hard Place / Ronnie Close / 2009 / 4:54 min.
Curtain / Peter Bobby / 2009 / 4.52 min. (extract, HD Video)

AVE–Russia
Program selection by Vika Ilyushkina, CYLAND Media Lab

Son of King / Julia Zastava / 2008 / 4:29 min.
Little Black / Nikolay Kurbatsky / 2008 / 1:51 min.
I want to live through your death / Olga Jitlina / 2009 / 5:44 min.
Storage / Anton Hlabov / 2009 / 2:20 min.
Expulsion from the Paradise / Andrey Ustinov / 2003 / 2:01 min.
Vertigo / Kirill Shuvalov / 2003 / 1:43 min.
Never ending / Masha Sha / 2005 / 2:12 min.
Mom / Yuri Vasiliev / 2002 / 0:55 min.
Feedback / Maksim Svishev / 2009 / 5:42 min.
Purification / Veronica Rudyeva-Ryazantseva / 2008 / 4:30 min.

AVE – Norway
Program selection by Mona Bentzen

Amerika / Ane Lan / 2003 / 3:15 min.
Che Guevara’s Rolex / Birgitte Sigmundstad / 2009 / 4:40 min.
Par Hasard / BULL.MILETIC / 2009 / 5:15 min.
Opacity / Farhad Kalantary / 2005 / 5:30 min.
Erase / Margarida Paiva / 2009 / 3:30 min.
Felix Culpa, A Handmade Massacre / Martin Skauen / 2007 / 5:06 min.
RUR / Mona Bentzen / 2010 / 2:16 min.

A VIDEO SERENADE is organized by Madeline Djerejian, AVE-USA, in cooperation with ArtVideoExchange and Format Network, with support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), CYLAND Media Art Laboratory (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the St. Petersburg branch of the National Center of Contemporary, Art (NCCA).

AVE is an international exchange program and initiative between artists and curators that promotes the production and circulation of video programming worldwide. Format Network is an artists’ group based in Bristol, UK that focuses on staging activities of exchange and engagement, including screenings and exhibitions, lectures by invited artists, critics and theorists, and open-mic performance evenings.

[Text and graphic from EFA website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Skuc Gallery
Stari trg 21
SI – 1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
ph: + 386 1 251 65 40

23 December – 15 January 2010
Removed from the Crowd:
The Fate of Outer Planets

Concept: Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca
(Institute for Duration, Location and Variables – DeLVe)

“Removed from the Crowd / The Fate of Outer Planets is a curatorial/art-historical piece based developed through an ongoing research that considers the phenomenon of the New Artistic Practice in the Socialist Republic of Croatia during the 1960s and 1970s outside the context of the analysis of the actual artistic production of that time, involving new elements and fragments with each new presentation.

The first phase of the long-term project was the publication Issue-ing the Revolution published as the 83rd issue of the Life of Art Magazine/Zivot umjetnosti with contributions by Jens Kastner, Waler Seidl, Marco Scotini, Maroje Mrduljaš & Srecko Horvat, Jelena Vesic & Dušan Grlja, Sezgin Boynik, Artur Zmijewski, Maja & Reuben Fowkes, Hedvig Turai and the editors Ivana Bago & Antonia Majaca (hart.hr/izdanja/zivot-umjetnosti), while the second phase eveloved as the educational program Kustoska platforma comprised of 10 monthly seminars with the students of art history in Zagreb initiated in Spring 2008 and focusing on the history of curatorial and exhibition practices Croatia.

The first ’staging’ of the project, presented earlier this year in Belgrade in the framework of the exhibition Political Practices of (Post) Yugoslav Art focused on the modes of collaborative work of artists and the forms of self-organisation while the second one, at ŠKUC Gallery, includes a new chapter focusing on progressive curatorial strategies and innovative exhibition models during 1960s and 1970s.

Fragment 1: New Collective Practices – Artists’ Association Beyond Manifesto and Program stems from a consideration of the three-year activity of the Podroom Working Community of Artists. Podroom, an artists-led space initiated by Sanja Ivekovic and Dalibor Martinis, was a working and exhibition space that between 1978 and 1981 brought together the key figures of the New Artistic Practice. A transcript of a conversation (a working meeting) held in Podroom and published in the ‘catalogue-journal’ First Issue (1980) serves as a point of departure for the rendering of narrative about self-organised artistic initiatives and the history of associations from Gorgona Group at the beginning of the 1960s to the establishment of the artist –run PM Gallery in Zagreb in 1981. What is common to all the initiatives, irrespective of their duration, is the specific, non-programmatic and organic manner in which they group together around an only adumbrated common goal. The fragment focuses on temporary manifestations of collectiveness, on models of ‘being singular plural’ or more exactly, on being-with as a search for a different understanding of the relation between individual and collective, but also for the point of a collective itself and the possibility of a joint programme.

Fragment 2: New Curatorial and Exhibition Practices brings the focus to innovative curatorial and institutional practices with the special attention given to the projects initiated and curated in the 1970s by Ida Biard in Zagreb and Paris. Selected curatorial projects, as well as institutions and informal spaces in which they took place, are here not seen merely in the role of mediators who present artistic products to the audience, but as the active protagonists and initiators of innovative approaches to contemporary art, whether these concern the New Tendencies movement, early conceptual art of the 60s or the New Artistic Practice of the 70s.

The title Removed from the Crowd (taken from the title of a piece by Mladen Stilinovic from 1979) thus becomes a signifier not only of the differentiation of the ‘associated individuals’ as against the ideologically propagated collectivity but also a signifier of the actual methodology.

Accordingly, the intention of the project is not the creation of a ‘convincing’ and scientifically well-grounded historical or art-historical narrative – it aims rather to indicate an associative cartography functioning as memory script, a map that selects the facts about processes, methodologies and situations considered to be relevant for us today as well as from a series of speculations derived from the enlargement of details, deliberate omissions, arbitrary connections, all in the aid of articulating a different viewpoint, a temporary and unstable truth through a different ‘performance’ of the writing of the history of contemporary art.

Skuk

[Text from e-art now. Graphic from Skuk website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Image: Danica Dakic

Provisions will be reporting this week and next from both the Istanbul and Tirana (Albania) biennials, as part of our ongoing Balkan American Project.  We will be traveling with artists Edgar Endress and Judi Werthein.

This year’s Istanbul Biennial is organized by What, How & for Whom (WHW), a curatorial collective from Zagreb, Croatia, including curators Ivet ?urlin, Ana Devi?, Nataša Ili? and Sabina Sabolovi?, and designer and publicist Dejan Krši?.  They chose their theme based on Brecht’s song from Threepenny Opera, What Keeps Mankind Alive.  The exhibitions will delvee deeply into contemporary practices in the arena of arts and social change throught the works of 70 artists and arts collectives.

The Symbolic Efficiency of the Frame is the  theme for the Tirana Biannual, organized by Edi Muka.  Exhibitions will take place in the old Hotel Dajti, constructed by Italian fascists in the late 30’s.  For many years it was the only place foreigners were brought, but, ironically, where no Albanians were allowed to go.  Albanians have only been free from totalitarian communism since 1992 and its ‘transitional’ economy has experienced many setbacks.  Tirana’s mayor is also an artist, and is renowned for a citywide program to transform former communist buildings into Hard edge, Op Art masterpieces.  Tirana is also known for its numerous carwashes.

Previous Post on the 11th International Istanbul Biennial

It was the summer of 1989.  The Cold War was sounding the death knell for Communism and as a result, Serbia and Montenegro were on course to become the new Yugoslavia.

The art exhibition Yugoslav Documenta was on display in Sarajevo—it would be the last major exhibition of Yugoslav contemporary art as Slobodan Miloševic seized power.

Under Miloševic, a new era began—an era of war, ethnic cleansing, economic sanctions, and a decline in all aspects of everyday life in the country once known as Yugoslavia. In Serbia, two parallel worlds were created: the dominating world of warmongering, nationalist ideology and its world of marginalized opponents.

Miloševic did his best to quash the voices of those he oppressed, but artists continued to express themselves despite the fact that virtually no one between 1989 and 2001 saw their works.  During that time, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade became a passive tool of nationalist ideology and was effectively closed to ambitious, contemporary art.

Now, the works reflecting those troubled, controversial years are being shown to the world through On Normality: Life in Serbia, an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. The exhibition, curated by Dejan Sretenovic, will be at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center from Tuesday, May 5, through Friday, June 5.

Many of the artists whose works are in the exhibition are internationally renowned, including Raša Todosijevic, Milica Tomic, Škart, Biljana Djurdjevic.  The works of others have never been shown outside Serbia.

The American University Museum (DC) is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free.  Opening reception Tuesday, May 5, 6 to 8 p.m.

Image: Dragoljub Raša Todosijević, Gott liebt die Serben, 1993/2002. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade.

Provisions is engaged in a long-term arts and social change project in The Balkans.  Check out the results of our first online roundtable which was designed to elicit current thinking about the impact of political changes in the U.S.

Also read Balkan Myths in the current issue of World Beat.
Many thanks to project partners John Feffer and Kathryn Zickuhr at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Image: Banja Luka artist Mladen Miljanović

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 Å kuc, 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.