Category: ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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

Raluca Voinea is an art critic and curator based in Bucharest. Voinea studied Art History and Theory in Bucharest (1997-2001) and Curating Contemporary Art in London (2004-2006). In 2006 she co-founded E-cart.ro, a nonprofit, independent institution based in Romania dedicated to researching, producing and publicizing modern and contemporary art and architecture. Since 2009, E-cart.ro has been developing a new program of cultural debates and artistic interventions, under the generic title The Department for Art in Public Space. Voinea has been a co-editor of IDEA. Art + Society magazine, published in Cluj, Romania, since 2008. She is one of the directors … Read more

Paradis Garaj is a collaborative project by Stefan Tiron and Claudiu Cobilanschi that took place in a garage in the center of Bucharest. Various events and happenings occurred that subverted the traditional way of viewing art and opened itself to anyone with the slightest curiosity in its program.

Olga Stefan: You created a very interesting, new model for experiencing contemporary art: in a garage. The projects that you have held there, and your practice overall, are critical of existing power structures in the art community. What particularly do you oppose in the existing art system? What aspects do you feel … Read more

H.arta is a collective founded in 2001 in Timisoara composed of Maria Crista, Anca Gyemant, and Rodica Tache.

Olga Stefan: You are a collective of three female artists. How do collaborations evolve among you, and how do you manage to set aside egos in favor of the common goal?

H.arta: Our collaboration is based on our friendship. Friendship, as an inherent part of our lives: fulfils needs of intimacy, trust, and communication; provides an everyday support in the practical contingencies of life; constitutes a continual practice of negotiation in what concerns our ideas, difficulties, disagreements, and inherent hierarchies; ties private … Read more

Lia Perjovschi is an artist living and working in Sibiu and Bucharest. Her multidisciplinary practice recovers, collects, and disseminates information that has been inaccessible to Romania until 1989. A highly developed personal archive, Contemporary Art Archive, is formed through objects, diagrams, texts, images and film. She exhibits elements from this archive in different forms as her artistic project.

Dan Perjovschi is an artist, writer, and graphic artist living in Sibiu and Bucharest. Over the past two decades, Perjovschi has created drawings in museums, art centers, and public spaces. The drawings present political commentary in response to current events.

Olga … Read more

ARTMargins publishes  two new interviews with formers members of OHO, David Nez and Milenko Matanovi?. The Slovene OHO group, which formed in the late 1960’s, consisted of Milenko Matanovi?, David Nez, Marko Poga?nik, and Andraž Šalamun. It belonged to the wider Slovene OHO movement and regularly collaborated with this wider circle of intellectuals and artists. After very intense three years of working together, the members of OHO decided no longer to pursue success in the art world, trying instead to live closer to nature and to explore spirituality. Today OHO’s legacy represents one of the crucial references for Slovene contemporary … Read more

The Slovene OHO group, which formed in the late 1960’s, consisted of Milenko Matanovi?, David Nez, Marko Poga?nik, and Andraž Šalamun. It belonged to the wider Slovene OHO movement and regularly collaborated with this wider circle of intellectuals and artists. After very intense three years of working together, the members of OHO decided no longer to pursue success in the art world, trying instead to live closer to nature and to explore spirituality. Today OHO’s legacy represents one of the crucial references for Slovene contemporary art. A major Slovene prize for young artists has been named after the group.

In … Read more

The publication of Beti Žerovc’s interviews with David Nez and Milenko Matanovi? marks a significant moment for art historians such as myself who have researched OHO both as a cultural phenomenon and as an artistic collective. The most prominent historians of OHO have included Tomaž Brejc, Igor Zabel, and Miško Suvakovi?. All of them did important work reconstructing the group’s various formations and activities between 1965 and 1971, and assessing its legacy. A reevaluation of the OHO’s role in the history of post-war artistic culture was spurred by Igor Zabel’s 1994 OHO retrospective at Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija. Since then, more … Read more

ARTMargins Online publishes exclusive interviews with former members of the Ljubljana-based OHO Group, which formed in the late 1960’s and consisted of Milenko Matanovi?, David Nez, Marko Poga?nik, and Andraž Šalamun. It belonged to the wider Slovene OHO Movement and regularly collaborated with this wider circle of intellectuals and artists.

Milenko Matanovic is an artist and community organizer, founding the Pomegranate Center, whose mission has been to develop an effective model for helping communities prepare for the future using collective creativity, meaningful engagement and powerful collaboration. Matanovic began his career as an experimental artist in the late ’60s in his … Read more

ARTMargins Online publishes exclusive interviews with former members of the Ljubljana-based OHO Group, which formed in the late 1960’s and consisted of Milenko Matanovi?, David Nez, Marko Poga?nik, and Andraž Šalamun. It belonged to the wider Slovene OHO Movement and regularly collaborated with this wider circle of intellectuals and artists.

David Nez was born in 1949 in Massachusetts, USA. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He joined OHO in 1968, participating in exhibitions, happenings, photo projects and films. At first, he created objects, followed by environments and installations. Notable among OHO’s “Summer Projects” are his … Read more

What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb. Its members are Ivet ?urlin, Ana Devi?, Nataša Ili? and Sabina Sabolovi?, and the designer and publicist Dejan Krši?. WHW organizes a wide range of production, exhibition, and publishing projects. The collective directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb. “What, how, and for whom” are three basic questions that are central to any economic organization. They also concern the planning, concept, and realization of exhibitions and the production and distribution of artworks together with the artist’s position in the labor market. “What, how, and for whom” … Read more

Dietmar Unterkofler: You will represent Serbia at this year’s Biennale in Venice, while Tomislav Gotovac will be Croatia’s representative and Marina Abramović will also be there for promoting her Cultural Center in Cetinie (Montenegro). So, three of the key figures of the 1970s avantgarde scene in the former Yugoslavia will be present in Venice. Do you think this is a signal for the late rehabilitation of the still marginalized generation of conceptual artists of the 1970s?

Dragoljub Raša Todosijevi?: I think we can’t speak of a real rehabilitation, and even if so this is only partly true. I think it … Read more