‘Between Worlds (Bačva Gallery)’

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  JONAS STAAL – Monument for the Chased-Off Citizens of Rotterdam

  2008 two-chanel video installation, 9’11”; 1′ 34”, loop   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. […]

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  LUIZA MARGAN – Melting Ground

  2009 Video, 5′ 50”, loop &nbsp 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 […]

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  ALBAN MUJA – Blue Wall Red Door

  2009 Video, DVD PAL 16:9, 32′ 44” &nbsp 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 […]

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  DEBORAH KELLY – Tank Man Tango: A Tiananmen Memorial

  2009 Video, 5′, 28 color photographs, 15×20 &nbsp 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 […]

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  DŽAMIL KAMANGER – Working in Public Space

  Working in Public Space Kalle Hamm and Dzamil Kamanger 2012 Video, HD PAL, 16:9, stereo, 28′ 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 – […]

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  BARBARA BLASIN – Brought to Justice

  2010-2011 Video installation, 11′ 10′, (work-in-progress) Camera and editing: Jadran Boban   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 […]

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  DUŠICA DRAŽIĆ & DEQA ABSHIR – The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

  2011 handmade coat 23 color photographs, various dimensions projection of photographs Video, 53′ 47” Video, 59′ 34”   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. […]

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  BAČVA GALLERY – Between Worlds

  Private / Public Memory and Private / Public Space   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 […]

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  STEFANOS TSIVOPOULOS – Lost Monument

  2009 Video, HD transferred on DVD. 27′ Courtesy the artist 22 b&w archival photographs on archival paper, 21 x 21 7 b&w archival photographs on archival paper, various dimensions Archival film, color, Digibeta transferred on DVD, 4′ Archival film, b&w, 16mm transferred on DVD, 45”   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 […]