Author: ARTMargins

Matei Bejenaru is a visual artist who lives and works in Iasi, Romania. He teaches photography and video art at “George Enescu” University of Arts. He is founding member of Vector Association in Iasi and director of the Periferic Contemporary Art Biennial (1997-2008). He has participated in several group exhibitions, including those at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London (2007) and the Taipei Biennial (2008). Between November 2010 and July 2011, his experimental project for choral music Songs for a better future was shown at The Drawing Room and Tate Modern (Turbine Hall) in London, at Western Front in Vancouver, … Read more

Suzana Milevska is an art and visual culture theorist and curator based in Skopje, Macedonia. Her research and curatorial interests include postcolonial critique of hegemonic power in art, complex relationships between gender theory and feminism(s) in art practices, and socially engaged and participatory projects. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College in London, where she taught from 2003 to 2005. She was the Director of the Center for Visual and Cultural Research at the Euro-Balkan Institute in Skopje (2006 to 2008), and taught History and Theory of Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje (2010 … Read more

Polish-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist Joanna Malinowska works mainly in sculpture, video, and performance art. Her projects are often inspired by interest in cultural anthropology and cultural clashes – she traveled to the American Far North to make a video documentary on Jimmy Ekho aka Arctic Elvis – an Inuit folk singer and Elvis Presley impersonator. In one of her early video explorations, Malinowska impersonated a stereotypical Polish cleaning lady and cleaned apartments of New York intellectuals in exchange for private lessons in philosophy. Malinowska’s work has been presented in many solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe, … Read more

Lecture series at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, April 2012 & February 2013

How can the margins be viewed in art, in the new world order, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the new era of globalization, when the cultural canons seem to have disappeared, when there is no longer a master narrative nor a distinct center? Can we still speak about margins at all? Or have they been shifted to another geopolitical sphere? This lecture series, Theoretical and Critical Problems of the Margins Today, takes a look at the theoretical presuppositions and implications … Read more

From May 25–August 19, 2012, an exhibition titled Sounding the Body Electric, Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe, 1957–1984, at the Muzeum Sztuki in ?ód? explored the relations of the visual arts and experimental music. The exhibit featured graphic scores, installations, artists’ films and documents of happenings produced across Eastern Europe during the "thaw years" and after. The starting point of the exhibition is the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio founded in Warsaw in 1957 by Józef Patkowski. It was not only a symbol of the change in attitude of the Communist authorities toward electro-acoustic music, but also an … Read more

In this interview we discuss the exhibition Political Practices of (Post-)Yugoslav Art: RETROSPECTIVE 01 (hereinafter referred to as PPYUart that Jelena Vesi? co-curated with a group of independent curators, theorists, researchers, artists and activists, andwhich was presented at the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade in 2009. The project was initiated by four independent organizations: the new media center kuda.org (Novi Sad); the curatorial collective WHW (Zagreb); Prelom kolektiv (Belgrade); and SCCA/pro.ba (Sarajevo).

Nikola Dedić/Aneta Stojni?/ARTMargins Online: I would like to start with a question about the exhibition title, which is long and difficult to remember on the one hand, … Read more

Nikola Dedić/ARTMargins Online: You came originally from the world of theater. Recently you have mostly worked in the field of visual arts. Why?

Aneta Stojni?: I would not say that I’m working specifically in the field of visual arts, but rather that my work is in the field of performance art. On the other hand, I did move away from theater (in the classical understanding of the discipline) at a certain point because it became too hermetic and self-referential for my practice.

Maybe someone could say that performance art is closer to the visual arts field, but I don’t really … Read more

Aneta Stojni?/ARTMargins Online: Is it possible to talk about a “collectors’ scene” in Serbia today?

Nikola Dedić: I wouldn’t say that the word ‘scene’ is completely adequate, but I would definitely say that private collections are new phenomena within local art markets that have emerged over last decade. With this phenomenon, certain institutional changes regarding the production and presentation of contemporary art have also emerged: in the period of the socialist state, for example, centralized cultural institutions dominated in Serbia, with the Museum of Contemporary Art being a main institutional determinant. The Museum, at that time, reflected the orientation of … Read more

The following series of interviews was conducted by Olga Stefan on the occasion of the exhibition Just Another Brick in the Wall, at Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, December 8, 2011-January 7, 2012 (http://olgaistefan.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/life-coaching/). In conjunction with this exhibition, interviews were conducted with some of the participating artists, including the Bureau for Melodramatic Research (Bucharest), the Center for Visual Introspection (Bucharest), Lia Perjovschi (Sibiu/Bucharest), Club Electro Putere (Craiova), Paradis Garaj (Bucharest), H.arta (Timisoara), as well as with Dan Perjovschi (Sibiu/Bucharest) and Matei Bejenaru (Iasi). Stefan seeks to discover what concrete elements within the existing system are being criticized, and … Read more