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WHAT ABOUT POWER RELATIONS?
16. – 30. 9. 2008
We kindly invite you to the opening of
an exhibition on Tuesday, 16 September at 7 pm at
the Škuc Gallery and at 8 pm at the Vžigalica Gallery
– Gallery of City Museum of Ljubljana.
Sodelujoči umetniki / Participating artists:
Nemanja Cvijanović
(Hrvaška / Croatia), Jakup Ferri &
Driton Hajredini & Lulzim Zeqiri (Kosovo),
Igor Eškinja (Hrvaška /
Croatia), Irwin
(Slovenija / Slovenia), Zlatko
Kopljar, (Hrvaška / Croatia),
Uwe Laysiepen – Ulay
(Nizozemska / Holland), Alban Muja
(Kosovo), Vladimir Nikolić
(Srbija / Serbia), Franc
Purg (Slovenija / Slovenia),
Şener Özmen
& Cengiz Tekin
(Turčija / Turkey), Veso Sovilj
(Bosna in Hercegovina / Bosnia & Herzegovina),
Inga Zimprich & Ingela Johansson
(Nemčija / Germany & Švedska / Sweden).
Avtorica projekta / Project's
author:
Mara Vujić
Konceptualna zasnova in koordinacija /
Conceptual design and coordination:
Yane Calovski
(Makedonija / Macedonia), Alenka
Gregorič (Slovenija / Slovenia),
Tevž Logar (Slovenija /
Slovenia), Mihaela Richter
(Hrvaška / Croatia), Martina Vovk
(Slovenija / Slovenia), Mara Vujić
(Slovenija / Slovenia),
Vanja Žanko (Hrvaška / Croatia).
The question of the art system, and the
individual's positioning within, is a broad-based issue,
addressed in various ways by these exhibited works. As such,
the art system is an abstract structure organising the
production, context, reception and distribution of artworks,
as well as at the same time retroactively defining meaning –
even when the artist's work singularly lacks any such
intention. This process generates a variety of disciplines,
such as the construction of meaning, symbolic relations and
the distribution of power (visibility), which provides
internal regulation, not only of knowledge, but also of
value, both with regard to an individual artwork as well
as entire regions that may (however unwillingly) be
represented by a single piece. Within the geopolitical
topography of art, the uncompromising abyss of distinction
between Western and Eastern contemporary art is becoming
ever-more exposed.
Such distinction reflects the geopolitical
reality of contemporary political systems common to the
first (“developed”) world – which are not indigenous to art
– whilst at the same time it is this very reality which
gives birth to the internal, symbolic topography of art,
defining all Eastern art on the basis of some new specific
identity, painfully constructed through the creation of art
and culture.
The question of the art system, as an
instance in the construction of knowledge as to art and
appraisal of its value, not only pertains to broader
realities of individual cultural identities not indigenous
to art, but also notions which are completely art
indigenous, such as questions as to the author (and the
related market value); questions pertaining to the search
for one's prehistory (the ambivalent (in)ability to refer to
similar artistic practices in the past, as well as the
construction of one’s own history); the question of (in)ability
to choose one's own position or identity within an organised
network of art and social habitat within a local or
international milieu; together with the question of
contextualisation of art within the ‘museumalisation’ of the
artwork and within the construction of national icons and
related value symbols, which may extend the circumstances of
its meaning/value/market value within limits that are
unpredictable.
These are the questions addressed by the
exhibited works, as individual points of reference in a
symbolic intertwining of the art system within a systematic
network structure – in the broadest sense of the word.
Rather than focussing on the search for answers to a single
range of questions, the exhibition simultaneously poses
allegedly various and unrelated questions (such as the
issues of Western and Eastern art, and the question of
originality) in order to point to their intrinsic and
complex intertwining, which determines the very nature of
the art system, and simultaneously assumes brutally real as
well as extremely speculative characteristics as regards
structure.
In his work entitled Death Anniversary,
Vladimir Nikolić stands against predominant western
ideology, which doesn't allow artists from the Balkans any
existence other than those which are peculiar or,
ethnologically, geographically and politically marked by
their region. Thus Nikolić ultimately paraphrases this
western orientalistic view of a Balkan individual, and
finally becomes this homo balcanicus who in his own
exotic, picturesque, ethically-anti-modern and prehistoric
way pays tribute to the memory of Marcel Duchamp. The
Anniversary therefore becomes an earmark of forced
»balkanisation« and voluntary orientalisation of
contemporary eastern art, for an imposed identity which
beforehand defines its character and position, whilst at the
same time efficiently silencing its voice under the forced
mask of an ethnologically-tribal curio. Alban Muja’s
Free Your Mind, deals with the pantheon of
international contemporary art. He frames the selection of
resounding names in the tense countdown of role models,
which – because of Muja’s desire for his own sovereign
artistic identity, free of any such role models – becomes
some sort of exorcism of the artistic spirits. In the
perspective of a young artist from a country deemed to be at
the margins and periphery, the list of names oscillates
between wish and frustration; namely, Muja’s legitimate wish
to create his own artistic identity within the densely
populated past and present of contemporary art, is
drastically conditioned by the geopolitical realities of the
environment he was born into. One’s own historical and
political identity is simultaneously a blessing and a curse
on the road to dominion and autonomy in artistic creation.
Such is also the topic of The Art of Bosnia and
Herzegovina Is Within the Borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina
by Veso Sovilj. His work reflects the current
question of »pro-Bosnian politics« in post-modern Bosnia,
where the territory is the ultimate notion and where the
very preservation of Bosnia-and-Herzegovina as a state is
based on ensuring the continuity of its domain. In such a
way, Sovilj paraphrases the situation of contemporary art in
Bosnia- Herzegovina, which is – due to the geopolitical
determination of the environment and the systematic
closing-up of borders within the state – pushed to the
margin, and consequently erased from the international map
of contemporary art.
Authors from a country which is not
integrated in the »proper« historical order, and are,
accordingly, incompatible with the development of modern and
contemporary western art, share a similar predicament.
The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet by Şener
Özmen and Cengiz Tekin paraphrases any
engagement, even the most earnest – such as, for example,
Courbet's – as an act of tragicomedy and farce doomed to
mockery. Artists from a country which lacks an authorised
history of modern art can face the situation of engaged
artistic practise merely through trivialisation and
banalisation of hallowed history. Which raises the question:
can engaged practise within the endless thicket of benign
contemporary art today only present itself as an absurd
travesty? The attributes of modern and contemporary art are
dealt with in a similar way by Igor Eškinja. In his
work Untitled (Realism), he creates on a gallery wall
a Babylonia of markers which seem to lose their proper
reference because of their crossing and intertwining, thus
becoming real, the actual realism of the system of art
history. In this light, the categorisation, classification,
systematisation and distribution of knowledge of
contemporary art become a game with empty markers, an absurd
complicated mesh of adjectives that can no longer grasp the
essence of artistic work or harness it into the dominant
narrations of modern and contemporary art. In his work
Chronos Devouring His Own Children, Nemanja
Cvijanović reduces the statement of an artwork to bare
materialism. He ironically praises possession as the
ultimate threshold of the piece, and something which is only
realised upon closing the deal; only when the customer gains
title, is the artwork made possible/realised. The issue of
authorship is thus driven to the utmost cynical point, the
very one which ultimately – in the name of capital – also
labels the territory of a gallery as private property, and
by way of that addresses the issues of vanishing public
space.
The subject of authorship is also tackled in
Namepickers, a work by the Irwin group. In a
straightforward and simple way – and with an elegant
allusion to prostitution – Namepickers points out
that the essence of the artwork is determined by the
author's name. Namely, rating of the artist’s name affects
the market value of the work, and, retroactively, also his
identity, which is perceptively – ironically – completely
identical in any case. Thus we are facing the perfidious
logic of a market also capable of capitalising the
speculative values of the author, even when these prove to
be practically indefinable. A different ranking system of
artistic identities is addressed by Zlatko Kopljar in
his works K11 Gotovac and K11 Demur (from the
K11 series of portraits) in which he portrays his
colleagues, outsiders in the recent history of art, whilst
simultaneously recognizing his own position. These portrayed
artists – at this exhibition the portraits of Tomislav
Gotovac and Boris Demur – have been excluded from the
official mainstream of contemporary art as »non-aligned«,
non-adapted identities which by way of their marginal
position and own freewill, form a somewhat parallel reality
to the recent art history and the present.
The fact that the value of authorship may
ultimately be instrumental within the establishment of
national icons and a national mythology is revealed by
Uwe Laysiepen – Ulay’s work There is a Criminal Touch
to Art. In this artistic action, documented on film,
Ulay reveals the mechanism which contextualises artwork as a
national icon, a mechanism that includes suppressed
exclusion, nationalism and xenophobia, and which – at a
critical moment – bursts to the surface as the very essence
of an instrumentalised artwork - the Poor Poet by
German romanticist painter Carl Spitzweg. The issue of the
art system working in mysterious – if not inconceivable –
ways is addressed by Franc Purg and his public
installation entitled Art-System. This intervention,
with its annoying direction of the visitor towards the
gallery entrance, imitates at a metaphorical level the
absurdity and imperative dominance of any system and its
rigid forms, as well as tests the individual's obedience,
which is also submitted to systematic rules of power
positioning and distribution within the art system. In
their work Waiting for a Curator, Jakup
Ferri, Driton Hajredini and Lulzim Zeqiri stage
this power game between two significant protagonists – the
artist and the curator – in the contemporary art world in an
ironic way. In the context of the power relationship, social
recognition and the artists' international success are
played through the mechanisms of social capital
accumulation, which pushes the artwork into complete
irrelevancy and anonymity. In their work Ordungen der
Liebe - What Went Wrong with Manifesta 6? (in which they
engage a therapy group to play the key figures in the
production of Manifesta 6), Inga Zimpich and
Ingela Johansson show that the art world too has its
victims of weak and self-interested human passions. Over the
process, their work becomes perceptively deceptive analyses
of cultural and economic organisation, political naivety and
notoriety, thus revealing the view of the very viscera of
the art system in which concealed power relations within the
field of contemporary art determine a lot more than may be
perceived at first sight.
Martina Vovk
Produkcija / Production:
Festival Ex Ponto
(Kulturno društvo B-51, Ljubljana (Slovenija) / ( Ex Ponto
Festival ( B-51
Cultural Society),
Ljubljana (Slovenia)
Soprodukcija /
Coproduction:
Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana
in Mestni muzej Ljubljana
(Slovenija) / Škuc Gallery and City Museum of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
Project supported by
Ministry of Culture of the Republic
of Slovenia and Fokus’08
(Netherlands – Slovenia)
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