Author: ARTMargins

About a year ago when Emil Hrvatin and I proposed a performance project addressing collectivity, I couldn’t anticipate the resistance and confusion the term alone would bring.

A dozen responses from programmers, critics, and theorists from the experimental field of European dance and performance, whom we asked for a critical reflection on the project proposal, resonated in a consensus of questions:

“Aren’t you aware of how ideologised and outmoded the term is? Do you mean collectivity as a modus operandi or as a topic of research? In other words, are you working collectively or on collectivity? We would be happier … Read more

Oleg Aronson, Metakino. Moscow: Ad marginem, 2003.

Cinéma-1: L’image-mouvement (1983) and Cinéma-2: L’image-temps (1985), Gilles Deleuze’s two famous books on the cinema, are hallmarks in the history of film-theory: they display a shift of interest from thinking about the peculiarities of the medium to a much wider context.

For Deleuze, the main authors-directors of the history of the cinema do not think in notions, but in pictures. His writings on the cinema bestowed philosophical dignity on the field. That film-theory has gained a better reputation in institutions of education and culture all over the world during the last … Read more

In his essay Musealization of the East, Boris Groys lucidly detects a basic problem in the attitude towards the visual arts of Eastern Europe (the former communist states).

He claims that it is not the excessive exoticism of East European art that would cause it not to be musealized in the West because things perceived as foreign and exotic are successfully included in the Western museum environment.

The reason it cannot be understood as art in the west lies in the formal and aesthetic similarity between Eastern “non-art” (the western perception) and Western “art”.

The decisive difference, however, is … Read more

Vladimir Dvornikovic, an enthusiastic Yugoslav, imagined the Yugoslav supra-ethnic entity as a collective voice of the South Slavic “blood and race.”

Since publishing his monumental study on ethno-psychology entitled Characterology of the Yugoslavs in 1939, that marker of identity has disappeared twice: in 1941 as a consequence of invading Nazism, and in 1991 as a consequence of imploding Titoism.

Blood and race were once again tied to language as a distinguishing marker of ethnic particularity.

The latter fragmentation of Yugoslavia through the formation of new state entities arrived as result of the differentiation of the Yugoslav idea through the notion … Read more

Public vs Private: Cultural Policies and Art Market in Central and South-Eastern Europe Conference, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 4 February – 4 April, 2004

Within the framework of the second part of the Balkan Trilogy project, initiated in 2003 by Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, the conference Public vs. Private: Cultural Policies and the Art Market in Central and South-eastern Europe in Ljubljana took place in early April.

The second partner of the conference is the European network project republicart, which organizes a series of conferences and symposia that take place in 2004 in Vienna, Linz, Ljubljana, London, Lüneburg … Read more

Art and the indeterminacy of urban society

In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.(Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 no.1 (1986): 272.) – Michel Foucault

Consider the physical – and figurative – context within which a majority of our thoughts are taking place. The city is the place (physical or otherwise) from which most journeys emanate and are directed towards:

The model for the contemporary world. As large urban concentrations of developing countries expand in an abnormal fashion, new urban schemes are … Read more

Rethinking Malevich, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, February, 2004

In February of 2004, the New York based Malevich Society organized a two-day conference Rethinking Malevich, in celebration of the 125th anniversary of the birth of the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich.

The Elebash Recital Hall of the CUNY Graduate Center located in New York’s glamorous intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34^th Street housed the event.

Two years ago members of the Malevich family established “The Malevich Society”, a private non-profit organization, with the mission to advance knowledge about the pioneer of modern art, Kazimir Malevich, and his work.

By … Read more

Call Me Istanbul ist mein Name, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 18 April – 8 August, 2004

Mangelos (retrospective) and a project by Marjetica Potrc, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 20 May – 19 September, 2004

L’arte del mediterraneo, MACRO, Rome, 3 June, 2004

Cetinje Biennial, Montenegro, July 2004 

Coming from Slovenia – a young nation state ever-navigating between the ideas of Central Europe and its recent Yugoslavian past, and slated to join the European Union in May 2004 – I am intrigued by the increasing interest that the region referred to as the Balkans, or as the more politically correct … Read more