Viewing posts from: bojan kristofic

26.08.2012.

REVIEWING THE ARTIST’S POSITION

The Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award Finalist Exhibition, Remont Gallery, Belgrade, 17/06-6/07/2012

By: Bojan Krištofić

The finalist exhibition of the Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award given to the best Serbian visual artist under 35 was held from June 17th to July 6th at the gallery of the Belgrade independent art association Remont. At the same time as this event was taking place in Serbia, in the Zagreb gallery Galzenica visitors could come and see the sibling exhibition of the Radoslav Putar Award finalists. Both awards have, in fact, been established in 2002 within the framework of the Young Visual Artists Awards program which, by developing a network of such awards in Central and South Eastern Europe, aims to advance the working conditions for young artists. In the countries where the YVAA awards are presented, Serbia included, the winner receives a scholarship for a three-month stay in New York and an opportunity to hold a solo exhibition in his own country. Whereas the Putar Award finalist exhibition has failed to deliver in regards of quality, the Mangelos Award finalist exhibition displayed several intriguing artistic concepts. The expert jury had a hard time selecting the winner, but in the end, this year’s Mangelos Award was given to a young artist from Novi Sad, Slobodan Stosic (b. 1989). His winning work 10 i po / 10 and a half ironizes the award itself and places Stosic alongside the ever-growing number of young artists to whom a critical exposure of the art institutions represents the focal point of their interests.

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12.07.2012.

THE GROTESQUE INFANTS OF THE REVOLUTION

Neo N.O.B. Ivan Fijolić, Lauba, May 1st – 26th, 2012

By: Bojan Krištofić

During the declarative commemoration of a few of the existing domestic antifascist holidays, the most influential media and government organs nearly never mention the following fact: in the whirlwind of war and conversion, 2965 monuments of the National Liberation War were ruthlessly ruined in Croatia, some manually, others by explosives, while the political will to appropriately punish the “unknown” vandals was never present then, in the early 1990s, and it mainly isn’t present today either.  Only some of these monuments have been restored, and, among them, one of the undoubted masterpieces of domestic postwar sculpting – Augustincic’s amazing monument of Marshall Tito in his birth town of Kumrovec.  This work of art, which was created in the short-lived phase of rigid Yugoslav socialist realism (from 1945 to 1949), which died down with the breaking of close relations with the USSR, has long since overcome the stylistic obstacles of statehood art, and it has maintained an undeniable aesthetic legitimacy.  The infamous fate of the monument after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia is one of those tragic metaphors that symbolically sums up the essence of the breakup of Yugoslavia.  When looking at this as a whole, in the past twenty years, all the antifascist monuments of various stylistic characteristics (from social realism to the modern abstract) have been regarded as disturbances by political nomenclatures, or, in best-case scenarios, as a necessary evil, as fossils of a buried time which is associated with riots, skirmishing, and outbursts of hate, and, sometimes, physical violence as well.  Very few people, however, rarely uncompromisingly oppose violence against our valuable cultural heritage.

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