Mladen Miljanović (1981, BA) attended the Reserve Officer School where he earned the rank of sergeant. After that he enrolled at the Academy of Arts (Department of Painting) in Banja Luka. Miljanović also deals with the social and therapeutic aspects of art, being the initiator of workshops for the disabled. He has based his art work on his own life experience: on the one hand it is the experience of growing up during the war and after the war in the destroyed, impoverished, ethnically and territorially divided, and externally isolated country; on the other hand it is his formal education. The consequences of the war (work with war invalids) and knowledge gained in military school […]

Workshops: May and September. Presentation of workshops and the book Emptied in Restitution (contribution to the Etnography of Emptiness), published by Heinrich Böll in collaboration with UIII . Greta, 11 October 2012, 7 pm . I am approaching the phenomenon of mass closures and demise of shops in the wider city centre from a pedestrian perspective, looking for the causes of these processes in which once frequented urban veins – Ilica, Tratinska and Ozaljska, and Maksimirska streets – have been transformed into emptied corridors. In the course of my research, I have become aware of my own disciplinary barriers, which is why I am trying to break them by organizing workshops intended for the students […]

  spatial interventions, Franjo Tuđman Square and Square of the French Republic, during the festival performance of the Concert for a Sewing Machine and a Tree, Franjo Tuđman Square, 9 October, 6:00 p.m., tone recorded by Milan Čekić   Movement for Space is a project consisting of a number of info-panels set in public space – on Franjo Tuđman Square and Square of the French Republic. The panels are situated on various localities in the park, containing brief textual explanations in which certain aspects of public space are treated as a “threatened species”, thus problematizing the gentrification process and the repurposing of public places. The artist draws attention to the threatened democracy of public space […]

  performative research, Flower Square, during the festival   The intervention called A Casual Flâneur refers to a series of accidental encounters between the author and the passers-by, in which the artist, with the sensibility of a Parisian stroller (flâneur), whose intimate voyeurism turns him into a critical observer of his surroundings, starts casual, almost accidental conversations about a seemingly unimportant topic: the everyday presence of the advertising screen, which has been flaring from the roof of a building on Flower Square for the past year. The project, of course, has been neither accidental nor banal: even though changes in the urban environment have permanent consequences for the paths along which people move and the […]

  audio installation, Oktogon, 6 October 2012, 8:00 p.m., 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. radio drama (coproduction of HR3, The Image of Sound, editor in chief Evelina Turković), HR3, December 2012. Sound technician: Zoran Sajko (HR3), Ognjen Škrborić (Radio Beograd). Sound design: Milan Filipović (Radio Beograd). Actors: Vilim Matula, Maja Katić, Petar Cvirn, Nikša Marjanović, Dejan Bulajić, Dejana Jočović, Luka Mijatović, Slobodan Đukić.   Student protests and blockades, based on the principle of plenum as a direct democratic student body – such as those organized in Belgrade in 2011 or at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 2009 – are an increasingly present phenomenon at the universities of Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Rijeka, Novi Sad, […]

  interventions in public space, Ilica 99, 110, 115, 199, 201. 6, 9, and 10 October 2012, 11:00 a.m.   Dzamil Kamanger started making interventions in public space in 2009. At first, interventions commented immigrants’ position in European metropolises, but now they comment on different issues concerning the place and work he is doing. By making his own handicraft work in Ilica Street, he wanted to aim the focus on the history of the street and its current situation. He wanted to show solidarity especially to the small shop keepers and craftsmen, who has had to give way to new kind of ways of doing business and not always very rightful ones. Dzamil Kamanger (1948, […]

Tripartite Slogans on Freedom light installation, French Pavilion, 4-7 October 2012 flyers, Student Centre, various localities Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort HD PAL, 16:9, stereo, 18 min, www.urbanfestival.blok.hr   Kalle Hamm: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ou la Mort // Part 1: French Pavilion from [BLOK] on Vimeo. Kalle Hamm wanted to comment on the history and future of the French Pavilion in the Student Center. His work of art is based on the notion that there was an inscription Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité on the top of the main entrance, which is not going to be placed there again in the ongoing renovation. He made an outdoor light installation on the wall of the French Pavilion, […]

  phase 1 – WhisperTalkSingScream   Originating from the need to reflect upon the current political and social situation in Croatia, especially considering the increasingly frequent social protests during the past two years, the collaborative project with the working title Whisper – Talk – Sing – Scream seeks to create a temporary monument to civic courage and energy. It consists of four main components: a website, a mobile sculpture for city squares, a performance, and a CD. In phase 1, I am creating a website, where I record my process of studying protest songs over a period of several months. Together with various activists and artists, I work on the lyrics in order to create […]

Franjo Tuđman Square – From Tuđman’s Workshop of Privatization Flower Square: A Draft for Its Spatial Decoding What awaits the Student Centre Thank you for your cooperation, we are closed until further notice – Emptied in Restitution   Franjo Tuđman Square – From Tuđman’s Workshop of Privatization It is the autumn of 2012. At the 13th Venice Biennial of Architecture, Croatia is represented by Pula Group. Their pavilion, named Direct Democracy Demands Direct Space, is an answer to the central theme of the biennial – which is Common Ground. The focal point of Pula Group’s exhibition is the map of the struggle machine assembled – a geographic map of the Croatian protest topography. By using […]

  [BLOK] in cooperation with the Working Group Four Faces of Omarska Readers’ group, public competition, workshop; SC – Savska 25, 13, 14, and 15 October 2012, 2:00 – 7:00 p.m. Round table, SC – Savska 25, 15 October 2012, 8:00 p.m.   The need of speaking openly about the use of SC venue as a transit camp during World War II, and the fact that it has often been passed over in silence and missing from the official history of the locality, we have launched a cooperation with RGČLO and invited a number of people who deal with commemoration practices, individually or within institutions. We do not seek to answer the question “How should […]

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 […]

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. […]

  HDLU, PM Gallery 5 – 24 October 2012   Good Night (State of the Body) is an exhibition concept consisting of three main parts: a video called Do You Intend to Lie to Me, a series of photographs titled Show Me Where It Hurts, and the performance On the Edge. The context of the exhibition can be described as the Oedipal position of various subjects. It is manifested through the interaction of the personal, political, and artistic positions of the body within the society, from three different standpoints. In order to describe art, the artist, actions, and systems, notions such as tactics, strategies, and simulations have become an integral part of the contemporary interpretation […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 – […]

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 […]

The twelfth edition of UrbanFestival focuses on the policies of remembrance, and besides interventions on four localities in the city, it includes exhibition programmes at Bačva Gallery and PM Gallery of the Croatian Artists’ Association (HDLU). The newly produced interventions in public space reflect this year’s circumstances of production: owing to the radical cuts in public (municipal and state) financing, and in order to ensure adequate conditions for curatorial and artistic research, as well as retain the established practice of paying the artists and all other participants who contribute to the festival, we have decided to reduce the means of production and the total number of new productions. The inclusion of the exhibition format into […]