RAPIDLY RENOVATED SPACE

Mikser Festival, an exhibition at Belgrade’s Cooperative, Belgrade, 25th May -25th June 2012.

By: Milena Milojević

Neon Night, i.e. Night of Museums and Creativity Festival, i.e. Mikser Festival are two very popular manifestations in Belgrade, which can take pride in their unusually numerous audience every year. Not only are these manifestations very popular, but they are also considered to have a spirit of carnival. While Night of Museums brings life to ‘’sleeping’’ exhibition spaces, Mikser Festival revives forgotten buildings, temporarily ‘’conquering’’ unused, public spaces.

This year international programme of Mikser Festival contains many curator and author projects in design, architecture, urbanism and visual art, realised through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, panels, concerts and actions in public spaces. Mikser Festival aims to help young creative artists in the region to affirm themselves, mostly by connecting them with well-organised world-wide networks. During its past few years, the Festival took place in Žitomil grain tanks, but this year its location is Savamala, a forgotten and unused space in the centre of Belgrade. In this way, creative artists use significance of this place for their work and by exhibiting their work and organising ‘’creative incidents’’ in this urbane zone, they also try to give it back its meaning.

Savamala is the oldest urbanised part of Belgrade, formed outside walls of Kalemegdan fortress in the 19th century. This was once the centre of city life and its trade, but it began to deteriorate rapidly after the Second World War. Although it is over burdened with cargo traffic, industrial plants, deteriorated and forgotten, Savamala undoubtedly presents an urban and ambiental whole of extreme potential for Belgrade’s further development. One building especially stands out and is very representative and that is the Art Nouveau building of Belgrade’s Cooperative, built in 1907 with elements of Neo-Baroque. Although it was proclaimed a cultural heritage, this building is undoubtedly deteriorating, which makes it another example of irresponsible behaviour towards cultural heritage. As reaction, or provocation to the current state of this building, Mikser Festival organised two international exhibitions of contemporary art that ‘’established direct dialogue’’ with this symbolically potent ambient.

Over 30 authors presented their work in two, conceptually similar exhibitions – Erased Space curated by Dušica Dražić and The Most Beautiful Building curated by Ana Adamović and Milica Pekić. Exhibitions are presented together, without any clear line to separate them and without any significant differences in curators’ initial concepts. The works were created through different methods and approaches to space of this vast building. First exhibition emphasises its ‘’spatious emptiness’’ opened for various interventions and possible transformations, while the second exhibition emphasises possible stories hidden beneath its layers and history.

A quick look over the exhibitions is enough to conclude that, although each artist was given a room or a hallway to use, the space has not changed significantly, which is why this entire building remained half-empty even after artistic interventions. There is an impression that artists did not take over the space, understood or redefined it. Furthermore, meanings and possible references of these works are not clear enough, which diminishes potential communication between most works. Instead of appreciating and understanding these exhibitions, the audience was left only with a possibility to admire this amazing building and its architecture.

One of these works that probably did not manage to achieve dialogue with the audience is a project by Ivana Ivković, created by a sign on the wall and huge amount of dry plums on the floor in one of the rooms. Sign is part of a text from a leaflet about a recent exhibition in honour of 150 years since the birth of the founder of the Cooperative, Luka Ćelović and plums are meant for eating. In this way, the artist encourages contact with history of this building, claiming that plums suggest its creation and their consummation brings to decreasing of the pile, i.e. to its symbolic deteriorating. This work is certainly ambivalent, but connection between plums and this building is unclear. Suggestion that consummation means destruction remains unconvincing and, in that view, how should artistic use of this space be interpreted? Is this exhibition also an usurpation that leads to destruction?

Irena Kelečević’s work is a good example of an artistic intervention which is the result of gathering, choosing and exhibiting found objects. Her installation presents reconstruction of an office, with clear signs of presence like a cup of coffee or scattered papers, but their expiry date testifies of past times. Everything in this scene is very predictable, fossilized and lacking in new ideas.

There are several artists that react to their environment and create visually and symbolically successful works. For example, famous installation called Tetris, site-specific by Swedish artist Mihael Johanson. He closed the empty space in a room with skilfully piled rows of books, files, televisions and other objects found in offices and cabinets. In this way, he literally intervened into the space, filling up the wall with an artificial creation made of old objects, which reflect well-known social dimension of Cooperative in this new physical order. Two works are very interesting as well as their spirit of Kafka; spiral steps by Marko Pejović made of drawers filled with bureaucratic documentations and Time of Exile by Goran Micevski. Pejović’s work is dominated by metaphorical dimension of a ‘’vicious cycle’’ of bureaucracy. Micevski’s work presents digression in relation to functions and purposes of this space, but it also emphasises nostalgic memories that seem stronger because this work is set in this building. Installation is composed of hand-made books by writers that were exiled or wrote on this topic in their novels and of tourist’s photographs of islands and reading lamps on an office desk. It was not possible to see Micevski’s hand-made books, because there was a tape that did not allow the audience to enter into the room. Visitors could only perceive installation’s overall atmosphere, but not its elements.

Mikser Festival presents another ‘’periodical spectacle’’ of culture and art, which is why it raises many questions regarding its status as a ‘’trend-setting’’ festival, the quality of its programme, as well as the nature of creativity it promotes. Judging by exponents in the Cooperative, this is not uncontrolled, unconstrained creativity, but a lay-out and combination of existing objects. Even the process of creation of most of these works is not unusual. It seems that this exhibition would be interesting to test the audience’s appetite and good taste. It would show how much the media praise of Mikser Festival and high quality of its production blurs audience’s critical thinking. Without any wish to discredit this important manifestation, especially its work on design and architecture, oscillations in quality of presented works and projects must be pointed out.