In the Monument for the Chased-Off Citizen of Rotterdam Jonas Staal is preoccupied with the possible directions of the development proposals to erect a monument to Rotterdam’s migrant workers in the Afrikaanderwijk settlement, which has been populated by migrant workers from Turkey, Morocco and South Eastern Europe from the early seventies. The proposal by Zenik Baran, Rotterdam’s Labour party councillor, in his debate with the leaders of the Leefbar party, right-wing populists, (un)expectedly turned into the Monument for the Chased-Off Citizens of Rotterdam: a white, heterosexual, Protestant, Dutch family of three – (ex)posing the homophobic and neo-colonial logic of the dominant ideology in this port city.

Jonas Staal (1981, NL) has studied monumental art in Enschede NL and Boston USA. His work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, lectures and publications, which emphatically relate to political subjects and developments. From a Beuysian perspective he interprets democracy – democratism – as a Gesamtkunstwerk. His essay Post-propaganda (Fonds BKVB, 2009) and publication Power?… To Which People?! (Jap Sam Books, 2010) provides the theoretical basis for this line of work. Staal has realized projects for exhibitions in many respected international institutions and manifestations, including the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the David Roberts Art Foundation in London and the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. He regularly publishes in magazines, such as Metropolis M and Manifesta Journal. Staal lives and works in Rotterdam, NL.

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Melting Ground by Croatian artist with a temporary Austrian address Luiza Margan deals with the nomadic-immigrant position from the perspective of the contemporary art system. Artists of younger and middle generations are drawn into the system of international exhibition practices and residences based on forced migration. Travelling from one residence to the other, from one exhibition to the other, artists who haven’t reached the status of “stars” rarely receive honoraria, have no steady incomes, social rights or a legal framework within which to protect their work. Speaking in the first person, from the position of an artist/migrant/subordinate, Margan raises the question of the (im)possibility of speech and representation in the public space, as well as the potential of the affirmation of Otherness. Not by chance, Flakturm, the monumental architectural reminder of Austria’s Nazi past, serves as her backdrop.

Luiza Margan’s (1983, HR) projects are research based works spanning a range of media including video, drawing, photography, text, sound and spatial interventions. In her recent work, the artist explores the relation of artistic engagement to a wider social context. In her video and audio works, real and fictive subjects inhabit and slip out of the prescribed social roles, thus enabling space for critical reflection of the history and value of the work. The physical presence of the body in relation to static social structures (Moving Pillar), as well as speech, is a repeated motivation in her exploration of silenced histories, codes of oppression and the capacity for subversive action through art (Anatomy of the Bow, 2012, Melting Ground, 2009).

Margan studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana (graduated 2006) and Vienna. She has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and across Europe, such as a solo exhibition Outside the Role at the SC Gallery in Zagreb, Croatia, 2011 and Ground Work, at the Vaska Emanoilova-Sofia Art Gallery, Bulgaria, 2009, and in group exhibitions such as Recalling the Past, the Poreč Annals, 2012, Andere Blicke Andere Räume, Passagegalerie- Kunstlerhaus, Vienna, 2012, Extreme, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna, 2011, Iron Applause, a group exhibition in the National Gallery in Bratislava, and others. In 2012, she took part at a residency program in Changdong National Art Studio, Changdong, Seoul, South Korea. In 2012, Margan won the purchase prize T-HT/MSU Art Award organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Croatia. Margan lives and works in Croatia and Austria.

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Blue Wall Red Door is a portrait of contemporary Priština sketched on the relationship between personal and collective memory. City has experienced numerous renamings of its streets during the transformation of the semantic universe of Kosovo’s society which resulted with the invasion of numerous individual pictorial poetics into public spaces. The painted doors and walls of houses are the only sure signposts in getting around the city, and they also serve as signs of a kind of humorous resistance to the official nomenclature and its service to political needs and functions of power.

Alban Muja (1980, KOS) is a Kosovo-based visual artist. His works cover a wide range of media including video installations, short films, documentary films, drawings, paintings and performances, and have been exhibited extensively at international exhibitions, festivals and shows, including personal presentations. Mostly influenced by the social and political transformation processes in Kosovo and the surrounding region, he investigates history and socio-political themes and links them to his position in Kosovo today. His recent solo exhibitions incude: From East to the Southwest – able Kulturverein, Berlin, Germany, 2010; All Around – Galerija SIZ, Rijeka, 2009; I – Scream – Free Your Mind‘, Gray Area, Area for Contemporary Art and Media, Korčula, Croatia, 2007. He lives and works in Prishtina, XK.

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Deborah Kelly’s work Tank Man Tango: A Tiananmen Memorial through participatory formats opens up new fields of commemorative practices and with its bottom-up approach relies on the thesis which claims that once a memory has been granted the form of a monument, it liberates us from the obligation to remember to a certain extent.  It is based on performance in the city’s public space, consists of an hour of contemporary dance, with its choreography created according to the steps of an unknown man who stood in front of a line of tanks, holding two plastic bags in his hands, during the uprising in Beijing’s Square of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in 1989. The artist interpreted the relationship between the body and movement dynamics of the Unknown Rebel towards the line of tanks as a dance – tango, and developed a choreography based on it, which is performed with the participation of anyone interested in partaking, at various squares in the world and on the anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square.

Deborah Kelly (1962, AU) is a Sydney-based artist whose works have been shown in streets, skies and galleries around Australia, in the Singapore and Venice Biennales, and elsewhere. Her collaborative artwork with Tina Fiveash, Hey, hetero! has been shown in public sites from Sydney to Glasgow and won the 2001 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras visual art award. She is a founding member of the art gang boat-people.org, which has been making public work around race, nation, borders and history since 2001. Her cross-media work considering the rise of religiosity in the public sphere, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, included public service announcement videos in train stations and projections onto clouds over Sydney Harbour. The participatory memorial she devised for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tank Man Tango, was performed in 20 cities on 4 June 2009. Kelly’s collage-based artworks have been shown in galleries in Australia, Germany, Russia, Korea, France, Brazil, Croatia, the US and Indonesia. Her most recent major work is a suite of 37 portraits of immaculately conceived families modelled on Renaissance Holy Family paintings. Kelly’s work won the 2012 Albury Art Prize, the 2009 Fisher’s Ghost Award, and the 2009 Screengrab International New Media Art Award. Artspace will publish a monograph about her work at the end of 2012. Deborah Kelly is represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis: www.gbk.com.au

Lungotevere dei Sangallo, Rome; Lungotevere dei Tebaldi I, Rome; Lungotevere dei Tebaldi II, Rome; Jewish Cemetery I, Prague; Jewish Cemetery II, Prague; Jewish CemeteryIII, Prague; Ilica 99, Zagreb; Ilica 115, Zagreb; Ilica 199, Zagreb
2012
9 color photographs, 70 x 100 cm

 
A series of photographs Working in Public Space shows performances by Dzamil Kamanger in Rome, Prague and Zagreb, where he displaces traditional Iranian embroidery from the private to the public sphere, and at the same time from a traditionally female to a traditionally male sphere. The motif of embroidery – of a visa (not) granted – becomes a trigger in raising the question of the political and economic emigrants’ position. Whilst the performance realised at the Jewish cemetery in Prague associates historical forms of fascism with the, often hidden, contemporary ones, the performances in Rome, on the bank of the river Tevere, where the most vulnerable strata of society reside, and Zagreb, in front of the small closed down shops in Ilica, raise the question of migrants who, as a rule, with or without visas, only serve as cheap labour in the new world.

Dzamil Kamanger (1948, IR) is an Iranian Kurd based in Helsinki. In his work he is concerning with his own experiences as a refugee by using traditional Iranian handicraft techniques. He has been collaborating with Kalle Hamm since 1999 although both of them also work independently. Together they have worked on several art projects dealing with the position of marginality in mainstream culture and the complexity of the multiple identities. They have also shown an interest in global networks, for example the traveling routes of plants and food ingredients. They work with video, photography and site-specific art works and interventions in public spaces. See also: www.beelsebub.org.

 
Barbara Blasin is preoccupied with the specific location of the mass arrests of male and female activists in Zagreb, who occupied Varšavska Street in the city centre in order to fight for the preservation of the public space of the streets and against its privatisation. The works celebrates the unnamed heroes/heroines – male and female activists who fought for the public good through a strategy of civil disobedience and openly criticised local and state government policies at the cost of their own freedom. In Brought to Justice, a recital on freedom, the verses of the baroque poet Ivan Gundulić, is repeated like a mantra and performed by the arrested activists by turns.  In her book of fingerprints which accompanies each video, the artist invites visitors to participate by joining the long line of activists from Varšavska Street with their unique fingerprints and signatures, highlighting the importance of personal engagement in the collective struggle.

Barbara Blasin is graphic designer, dealing with design and photography, and working in interdisciplinary art projects, particularly on public art projects. She has earned her degree at Graphic department of Design Studies – Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb in 2002. Her major interest in art is necessity of the participation of public during the work on project as well as in presentation of project. Blasin has received the Special award of the International jury at 46th Zagreb Art Salon in 2011 and the award of the AICA Croatia-AICA International at Zagreb Salon in 2008 and 2011. She was nominated for the literary award Kiklop, for popular science, for her book, Women’s Guide through Zagreb, in 2006. Lives and works in Zagreb.

 
The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a coat made out of a combination of a traditionally decorated African fabric and a white fabric with screen printed motifs of different items (audio cassettes, calendars, notes) which Somali refugees had brought with them to Kenya. The phases of its creation unfold in a series of photos and two videos showing the process which explores intimate histories and narratives, and personal archives and memorised experiences on various subjects, whose positions reopen the question of migration and, depending on the context, connote the issue of refugees or the question of neo-colonial relations. Narration follows the reviewing of personal archives, boxes with hundreds of such items/relics which have been carefully preserved for decades, the making of the coat and its transformation into an object that serves as an excuse to talk to and interact with the refugees who took part in the project and other passersby. In doing so, the coat is not treated as an aestheticised artefact, so feel free to take a walk in it through the exhibition!

Dušica Dražić (1979, RS) is an artsist, born in Belgrade (Yugoslavia). Dražić also initiated and curated collaborative projects and exhibitions. The issues that Dražić explores within her art practice deal with the ambivalent interrelationship of the citizen and the city, their mutual support and protectiveness, but also their isolation and destruction. Dražić searches for spaces of irregularity, difference, flexibility, intuition and focuses on abandoned, forgotten places in the urban structure of modern cities. Dražić explores their transformation and rethinks them at the level of cultural continuity, symbolic irregularities and individual actions. She exhibited in various solo exhibitions and her work is included in shows at What happened with the Museum of Contemporary Art?, MoCAB, Belgrade, Serbia (2012), Rearview Mirror, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2011), The Power to Host, ISCP, New York, USA (2011), Conversations in Silence, Goethe Institute Nairobi, Kenya (2011), Qui Vive? II Moscow International Biennale of Young Artist, Moscow, Russia (2010) and many others.

Kenyan-born Deqa Abshir has training in both art and women’s studies. An emerging artist in Kenya, her artwork expresses the complexities of identity.
“There are various influences that make up who I am, but my identity as a Somali Kenyan is fundamental to my life considering that I identify equally with my “Somalli-ness” and my “Kenyan-ness”. Additionally having spent 6 years in New York for my art education and having my family scattered around the world have all led me to question: What is identity? How rooted is it in citizenship or where we live? Through my paintings, I try to get these thoughts in order. I feel like this discourse of identity affects so many in my generation of young Africans who everyday are confronted with issues of globalization, while having to engage with national, tribal and cultural pressures. Contrary to what is expected, I believe this has made my generation stronger, more diverse and more accepting. This acceptance and growth is something I strive to express in my work.

Furthermore, my work attempts to highlight some of the paradoxes of modern culture: the way in which our traditional or semi-traditional upbringings and the culture that surrounds our everyday lives contradicts with the modern fixture tattooed across Africa. My artwork endeavors to highlight the juxtapositions between the realistic and the poetic, the traditional and the modern, the global south and the global north.

In using my art to comment on the world in which I live, I find myself maneuvering and winding my way through this world and using art as a lens to express my experience in the hope that this strikes a chord with the viewers of my work.”

 
By using dichotomies such as private/public or individual/collective, the exhibition Between Worlds investigates the relationship between memory and public space from the viewpoint of temporal and/or spatial dislocation. By problematizing social topics such as forced migration, representation of the past and its traces, and monumental art, it raises the imposing question of the role of art in creating the public sphere. Alexander Kluge has defined the public sphere as the factory of politics, since it is the space in which political and social change is taking place.[1] In that context, he has used the term counter-public as opposed to the classical modernist public, which is the representational or pseudo-public sphere. As such, the counter-public modifies and expands the possibilities for a public articulation of experience, and when it is missing, the very concept of politics is questioned. Referring to Kluge and Negt, Simon Sheikh has adopted the term, but using it in plural form as counter-publics, thus emphasizing that the public sphere should be considered as a fragmented rather than homogeneous formation, whereby he has also used the term in order to define the public space which seeks to offer different ways of thinking sociality and its reflexivity from the dominant ones.[2] The exhibition Between Worlds uses public space in order to articulate those experiences that have been barred from the dominant public speech. By moving between private and public, individual and collective, and by using self-reflection and reflection, the artworks presented at this exhibition produce counter-publics within which it is possible to speak about suppressed or marginalized social experiences and problems.

Fragmenting the modernist public space as the uniform field where collective experience is articulated occurs almost simultaneously with the upsurge in memory.[3] One of the reasons for the increased importance of memory with regard to history is the critique of the official versions of history and the discovery of historical segments that were suppressed when creating great historical narratives. The concept of memory enables us to rehabilitate the past of those social groups that do not have their place in the dominant historical narrative. The artwork called Tank Man Tango by Deborah Kelly offers a memory of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. There is no material trace of the event on the site itself, and it is not possible to talk about it. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the protests, Deborah Kelly made a performance in which some 400 people took part in twenty different cities all over the world, thus creating a temporary memorial in remembrance of all those who protested in Beijing and were killed, wounded, or arrested. Instead of being mere observers of a spectacle, the performers of the choreography participated in an action that restored their collective energy.[4] In this type of collective practice performed in public space, which fuses collective and individual, activity and passivity, distances in space, time, and consciousness, one can observe a desire to create space in which it will be possible to articulate the memory of a traumatic event.

Barbara Blasin likewise uses the relationship between private and public in her artwork called Brought to justice in order to create a sort of collective practice that confronts a memorial plaque with a collective action, resulting in a sort of temporary monument to struggle for public space. At the corner of Gundulićeva and Varšavska streets in Zagreb, some 150 people were arrested on July 15, 2010 because of participating in a peaceful protest against the systematic discrimination in favour of private investors by the municipal administration, to the detriment of public space, and against the exclusion of the public from making decisions about its use. Four months later, at the very same spot, the municipal authorities of Zagreb and Dubrovnik placed a memorial plaque with verses from Ode to Freedom by Ivan Gundulić to commemorate the breaking of the maritime blockade of Dubrovnik in 1991. Barbara Blasin has used this newly created situation to produce a video in which the formerly arrested activists stand in front of the memorial and recite verses from Ode to Freedom. Besides this ironizing act, the artwork includes a handmade map with scanned documentation regarding the arrests, with a stamp and the signature of an official person, as well as a protest book in which all those who support struggle for Varšavska and for the preservation of public spaces can sign their names or leave their fingerprints. In this way, through the dichotomy of private/public, or rather individual voice/voice of the public, the artists seek to investigate the current social relations and raise the question of who has the right and the power to make decisions about the spatial development of the city on the one hand, and the possibilities of memorialization on the other.

The relationship between the past and memory, and its manifestations in public space, are also the topic of The Lost Monument by Stefanos Tsivopoulos, in which the main protagonist is a statue of Harry S. Truman, set up in the centre of Athens in 1963. The statue refers to an important segment of recent Greek and European past, yet it has been the target of public discontent about the politics of power it represents from the moment it was erected. As the citizens of Athens find it impossible to identify with the monument, it has been rejected in the collective memory of the society. In this video, the statue wanders from one social group to another, and none of them is capable of identifying the person it represents. In this way, the artist has commented upon the historical events to which the statue refers, as well as the attitude of the society towards them, both past and present. At the same time, he has tackled the issue of the society’s collective identity, and the way it is constructed and/or deconstructed. In his artwork called Blue Wall, Red Door, Alban Muja likewise speaks about the dynamics of the past and the memory, deconstructing events from the past as manifested in the frequent changing of street names in Priština. This sort of self-reflection, both of the individual and of the society as a whole, produces transparency in the relationship between individual and collective memory, between private and public space, which helps us understand events from the past and their consequences for the present.

Artworks by Dzamil Kamanger, Dušica Dražić & Deqa Abshir, and Jonas Staal likewise focus on the dichotomies of individual/collective memory and private/public space, but from the position of being dislocated from the community, that is, from a nomadic-immigrant position. A change in the concept of memory has brought about a change in the concept of identity, and now there is no place left for the universalistic logic and for great historical narratives. Speaking about the European Union, however, we must keep in mind that it is largely composed of nation-states, which still operate according to the principle where nations tend towards constructing their collective identities through state institutions. Immigrants occupy the lowest position on the European labour market, as well as in the public sphere as the place of political and social change. InWorking in public space, Džamil Kamanger has investigated cultural interaction and the position of immigrant workers from his own viewpoint. In his art, personal is also political and private is public, and he uses self-reflection in order to speak about the refuge status of the Kurds in Europe and the (im-)possibility of their emancipation in their new community. In his performances, which he mostly stages in front of large shop windows with designer clothes in various European cities, Kamanger embroiders two motifs: a photograph that was taken at the time when he was a political prisoner in Iran, and visas of political immigrants. By using this sort of contemplation, he relates his personal experiences from his country of birth to the experience of living in a new community, using the field of cultural production as a site for the emancipatory extension of politics.

Private and public spheres are also interconnected in The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Dušica Dražić and Deqa Abshir. Individual memory embodied in an intimate object – a coat – refers to the problem of forced migration in Africa. The context of art has been used as a public space in which it is possible to articulate individual memory and thus indicate a broader problem that is present on the global level.

In his Monument for the Chased-off Citizens of Rotterdam, Jonas Staal has used public space in order to critically examine the issues of consensus, commemoration, and their political instrumentalization through dilemmas concerning public art, more precisely the monuments. He has juxtaposed two monuments: one representing immigrant workers and their contribution to The Netherlands, and the other autochthon Dutch workers. This juxtaposition has revealed the political instrumentalization and the ideological role and importance of public art in constructing national identity. By using this type of cultural subversion, Staal has in a way managed to deconstruct the debates about the decline of multiculturalism in Europe.

In questioning the relationship between public space and the construction of social or cultural memory, the exhibition Between Worlds also speaks about the role of the artist in the production of the public sphere, which raises the issue of re/presentation within art institutions. This is the topic of Luiza Margan’s Melting Ground. Regarding the fact that art is not an autonomous system, even though it often pretends to be one, Simon Sheikh has indicated, when speaking about the relationship between art and public space, that art is a public sphere in the form of a platform for various and even opposed subjectivities, policies, and economies, a place of struggle between different ideological positions.[5] Such a concept of public sphere and art entails a reflection on new institutional models, since the main role of museums and other art institutions in the modernist era was the (self-)representation of the bourgeois classes and their values. The modernist white cube has been replaced by a more commercial type of communication, that is, by cultural industries that function on the principle of demand and supply, while the term “public” has been substituted by “the market”. This amounts to a private appropriation of public space, with an aim of creating symbolic and financial capital. This leads us back to the importance of public space that is neither private property, nor the classical modernist type of public space, and which is as such of crucial value for the development of the community. Without it, the individual has no one to communicate with about the reasons for his discontent, no one to turn to, no base where social change could take place. Therefore, as Sheikh emphasizes, the artist as a public intellectual is not only engaged in the public sphere; his role is also to produce the public, or rather the counter-public.

Mirjana Dragosavljević

 
Lost Monument, the work of Greek artist Stefanos Tsivopoulos expound the political circumstances of the installation and the removal of the monumental figurative plastic in its local context. Video follows the story of the controversial and now demolished monument to Harry S. Truman, former President of the United States, located next to the Athenian Acropolis and Parliament, a favourite place for civic protests against the hegemony of American political/imperial interests in Greece. Tsivopoulos’ video work outlines the collective social amnesia through the journey of Truman’s lost monument, which, in a kind of odyssey, passes through all classes of Greek society (farmers, fishermen, migrants, the bourgeoisie).

Stefanos Tsivopoulos(1973, CZ) articulates the role of collective memory and the subjective interpretation of history. Research into mass media, archival images and found footage often form the basis for his films with poetic and allegoric undertones. Concurrent with the artist’s continued investigation into how collective memory is shaped by mediated reality, runs a fascination with the fine line between reality and its fictional reconstruction, as well as with the boundaries between the authentic and the scripted, the staged and the improvised. He is the recipient of the Golden Cube Award for the best video installation at the 25th Kasseler Documentary Film Festival in Kassel, Germany. His work is included in shows at the Manifesta 8 Murcia, 1st Athens Biennial, Witte de With Rotterdam, BFI Southbank London, Friedericianum Kunstverein Kassel, ev+a Biennial Limerick, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, and others. He lives and works in Amsterdam, NL.