TIME TO GET SERIOUS?

52nd October Salon | Time we met each other

October 20 – December 4, 2011, Museum of Yugoslavian History, Belgrade

By Ana Bogdanović

The October Salon is certainly one of the most important events of a scarcely populated exhhibition season for contemporary art in Belgrade and Serbia. The concept came about several years ago as an opportunity to present international artistic tendencies, whose topical limitations and selection of artwork are determined by a guest curator who is in turn delegated by the October Salon Council. The event marks a rare possibility for the domestic audience to get introduced to the latest contemporary output on the art scene, both locally and globally. Therefore, the organisers, as well as the curators, have big responsibility to carefully and professionally fulfill their obligations to the public and set up an exhibition that would allow the audience to interact, explore and contemplate the artistic interpretations of various contemporary aspects.

Using the slogan Time we met each other, the thematic framework for this year’s October Salon, defined by curators Galit Eilat from Israel and Alenka Gregorič from Slovenia, takes the notion of individual responsibility and its organisation in the local socio-political context. There is a selection of 27 domestic and international works, whose approach to artistic practice is based on observing reality as a method of simulation, experiment and reenactment, the goal of which is to face the present through reenacting the recent past. There is a relatively small number of works selected to embody the curators’ concept which, however, do not allow a thorough elaboration of the predefined complex theoretical notions and various artistic strategies. There are only segments of their visual references scattered in space without a wholesome contextualisation of the entire exhibition. Given the limitations of this text, similar to the situation mentioned, it is impossible to provide a more detailed analysis and question the problematic and complex theoretical postulates. Instead, attention will be given to the relation with the viewer, the audience and to what extent does it achieve its primary intention to question responsibility.

What makes a really powerful first impression and disrupts direct communication with the audience, as well as the viewer who wants to understand the exhibits without interruptions, has to be insufficient sound isolation around many of the video works. Sounds of different intensity are mixed together, creating an initial confusion while watching the show. Similarly, the narrative concept offered by the curators also creates difficulties in understanding the topic and its intention. The selected works mostly relate to the war in ex-Yugoslavia, either directly or indirectly, and its consequences (works by Katarina Zdjelar, Mladen Miljanović, Nemanja Cvijanović, Ibro Hasanović, Nebojša Šerić Šoba, Vahida Ramujkić) and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (Jael Bartana, Josi Atja and Itmar Roz, Amir Jaciv, Avi Mograbi, Haled Džarar). In this way, two completely different conflicts of the recent past are juxtaposed, which is unjustifiable from a political, ethnic and political perspective. On the one hand, these are wars that were fought because of strong political, ethnic and nationalistic interests between Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and then Albanians, within a single country in order to establish new little countries. On the other hand, there is a long-lasting conflict that has been raging for decades and is still current, between two opposing sides, triggered by the foundation of Israel in Palestine, while constantly redrawing the borders between the two countries. Pushed in the middle of these conflicts that are being reenacted in front of their eyes through artistic interventions, the viewer is left with little room to discover things on their own and make up their own mind about the past in the present moment simulated by the exhibition’s selection. This representation of “reality” is accompanied by works in which the role of the artist is very dominant and almost didactic. Works by Artur Žmijevski, Milica Tomić, Katerina Šeda, Akram Zatari or the Etcetera Group, subjectively interpret political and everyday situations, which results in defining and controlling the narrative frameworks of the past and their consequences for the present. Selection of such artistic standpoints limits the visitors freedom to independently respond to the more or less known past and present events and phenomena without any preconceived political or ideological frameworks. On top of it all, there is unproductive criticism of the relevant institutions’ cultural policies, which is woven through the display and repeated as curators’ statement in the exhibition catalogue and textual explanations of the artwork. As a reminder, the October Salon is enabled, organised and sponsored by city and state funds that were critiqued upon, that is to say, taxpayers’ money, so the exhibition’s responsibility rests with them.

As a result, in opposition to the initial imperatives of this year’s October Salon, there is only a superficial interpretation of the past, based on the good vs. evil paradigm, as well as victim vs. criminal, told from an unobjective and often manipulatory artistic perspective. It is constructed in such a was as to justify the curators’ and artists’ positions, this exhibition is self-serving, without paying any attention to the viewers. Several works, however, establish a mutual and productive relation with the audience with carefully planned visual ideas of the given topic. Art Klinika’s installation and Jan Fabre’s sculpture, as well as the ironic manipulation of reality in Mladen Miljanović’s and Artur Žmijevski’s video art, open a field of interest to the viewer who is entertained and encouraged to think. Unfortunately, these works do not manage to improve the overall impression of incompleteness and inaccessibility after we leave the Museum of Yugoslavian History. It’s time we met each other only seems to be following public trends and daily politics, which merely recycle old ideas and the atmosphere of the unruly 90’s, rather than offer a responsible relation to the present based on past experience in order to face the inevitable challenges in the future.