Brief overview
July 2004
ART AND PUBLIC SPACE
In collaboration with National Gallery of B&H and Academy of Fine Arts.
PRESENTATIONS
Monuments and Memory
Jochen Gerz (Paris) – Monuments to a Negative Past
Sanja Iveković (Zagreb) – Lady Rosa of Luxembourg
Braco Dimitrijević (Sarajevo, Paris) – Anti-Monuments
Kurt & Plasto (Sarajevo) – Sarajevo Busts Story
SEMINAR
Monument as “Private Matter” or Reading the “Public” Monuments
Lecturer: Bojana Pejić (Berlin, Germany)
Reading of Monuments as Producers of Social ans Cultural Effects
Iconoclasm: Why Monuments are Destroyed
Female Allegory in Public Space: Female Body that Guarantees State and/or Patriarchal Order
After Modernism: Public Art and Memory
PANEL DISCUSSION
Public Art and Memory
Moderator: Bojana Pejić (Berlin, Germany)
Panelists:
Christoph Tannert, Berlin
“The Infinity of Freedom”, Berlin 1990
Jack Persekian, Jerusalem
“Public Art in Palestine”
Dunja Blažević, Sarajevo
Actualization of the Past – Public Actions in Sarajevo
Barbara Borčič, Ljubljana
“Urbanaria”, Ljubljana
November 2004
EXHIBITION
Positive/Negative
The exhibition includes the works of those artists whose “material” are the monuments or their remnants, national or ideological symbols, patriotic and new collectivist “icons”, personalities from recent and distant past. Artists’ interventions on the existing piece, or usage of historically marked symbols and their positioning in a new connotative context, modify the field of meaning, tackling the issue of today’s attitude towards past.
The works presented at this exhibition initiate the themes of following conference.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Monuments and Violence
Moderator: Bojana Pejić (Berlin, Germany)
Introduction to the Panel Discussion “Damnation Memoriae” (2001), projection of documentary film directed by Bogdan Žižić, Zagreb, Croatia.
Maintain or destroy? (monuments-the remnants of former regimes, ideologies, or elements of historical memory?)
CONFERENCE
Dealing with the past
History / pseudo-history / anti-history
Forgotten past / Invented past
Reviving myths – new myths (myth of victim hood, myth of origin / ethno genesis, myth of antiquity of our people, myth of heavenly people) – consequences
Erasing memory – destruction of material remnants of national cultures and historical periods – consequences
Revising history – WW II, fascism – anti-fascism – consequences
Violence of Idols – character and mythologization of the war in B&H
Ethno-nationalism – national socialism; nationalism – neo-patriotism.
How to recognize fascism today?
Post-totalitarian Subjects – Women policy and activism relating the ruling politics and ideologies
Faces of Society, Faces of the State
May 2005
EXHIBITION / PRESENTATIONS
Cleaning of Symbolic Field: Collective vs. Individual
Exhibition presents the artistic reflection and the critique of social environment; art that empties, cleans the symbolical field of connotation (new symbolical representations of power); art that is created by a repertory of symbols of parallel, virtual reality; art that poses the question of individual as subject or object of history, that critically questions collective identities and identifications (events and symbols).
Presentation of the work of Milica Tomić “Debate on Monument” in the form of introduction on the course of public debate that she been organized and moderated, during the last several years, in collaboration with group of authors who are working on this project together with this artist. These are the debates on the meaning and purpose of erecting a monument in Belgrade (and of its very character) to the victims of the recent wars in the environs of former Yugoslavia.
PRESENTATIONS
Monument’s ideas and concepts or realizations
Moderator: Bojana Pejić (Berlin, Germany)
Sokol Beqiri (Peja, Kosova): Skenderbeg and Mother Theresa Monuments
C.A. Urban Movement Mostar (B&H): Bruce Lee Monument
Tadej Pogačar (Ljubljana, Slovenia): “Kings of the Street”, Parasite Museum
Marko Brecelj (Nova Gorica, Slovenia)
Nataša Ilić (Zagreb, Croatia)
Siniša Labrović (Sinj, Croatia): “Bandaging the Wounded”
The Winner(s) of the Sarajevo Monument’s Competition Presentation
PANEL DISCUSSIONS
Working Out the Past
Historical controversies / New views
Today’s controversies – what is being talked about, on what we keep silent?
Identity / new identities: Who and what forms them today? Who are we, what are we?
“Antigona, Kasandra, Fata”
Role and power of individual; individual as object or subject of history?
What is being taught at schools, what is not being taught at schools?
Lessons of the past-lessons to be learned
Art as Social Corrective
Art as social corrective-art as substitution for reality
To whom do the monuments of the past belong today? What to do with them?
To whom are the monuments being erected today? What to do with them?
January 2005 – January 2006
EXHIBITION
January 2005
Exhibition of the projects received at the public competition for the new monument will be followed by encounter of civic forum, public debate and the jury session.
REALIZATION OF THE NEW MONUMENT
January 2005 – January 2006
The process of realization comprises besides “materialization” – negotiations with local city/cantonal authorities concerning location, legal permissions etc. The new monument(s) will be offered to the city/cantonal authorities as the gift, with the obligation of their permanent installation in a public space. That will be the test of the functioning of relations between local authorities and civil initiatives, and the answer to the question: Who owns the public space?