Jury

Annual Award For Young Visual Artists For B-H

At the press conference, held on 27th September at the premises of Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Arts, the winner of the ZVONO award 2010 was announced. This year’s award went to Adela Jušić.

Jury Statement.

Members of the jury:

  • Maja Abdomerović, curator, National Gallery of  Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, chairwoman of the jury
  • Dunja Kukovec, curator and art theorist, Ljubljana
  • Pierre Courtain, artist and galerist, Sarajevo – Pariz
  • Anja Bogojević and Amila Puzić, curators and art historians, Mostar
  • Irena Sladoje, artist, Sarajevo (ZVONO 2009 winner)

The jury has decided on four finalists and a winner of the fifth Annual Award for Young Visual Artists – Zvono 2010.

After analysing all submitted art works, the jury, lead by criteria of innovativeness and authenticity in regards to contemporary art and social movements, has decided on four out of 31 works submitted.

Unanimously, the jury selected the works of following artists:
(in alphabetical order)

  • Igor Bošnjak, Trebinje
  • Mladen Bundalo, Prijedor
  • Adela Jušić, Sarajevo
  • Danijel Premec, Sarajevo

The jury has valued the art works in regards to current tendencies and movements in contemporary art practice. The intention of the award ZVONO is to point out to local, regional and international art and other public, to young artists and recent art production in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The jury identified a considerable number of high quality works, from all parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina pointing out to positive decentralisation.

Igor Bošnjak  – in his work he juggles with stereotypes and prejudices with strengthened  processes of egzotization and auto-egzotization of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also within the wider context of Balkan region. By conscious adoption of prejudices, the artist also adopts the responsibility for acting- or not acting on local level. With dexterous use of elements of humour, he easily involves the public to his art process.

Mladen Bundalo – with his art process he questions individual and collective mental matrices, creation of memory as well as the abrupt stream of consciousness. Thereby, the artist transcribes/ transmits and documents something that is impossible to convey absolutely and truthfully. Formally simple, the work expresses complexity and stratification of the idea which author uses to uncover individual emotions, as an artist, aficionado or the analyst with perceptive view on today’s situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Adela Jušić –  by utilizing the minimalistic approach in performing and realisation of the work, she penetrates the complexity of social relationships which function on the principles of marker-marked and inclusion – exclusion. The artist takes over the role of instructor (human manual) who collected, grouped and archived, and presented instructions to the artists on how to explicate one’s own work.

Danijel Premec  takes the start from his personal artistic standing through which he develops a critique of the society burdened with robotization of humans and humanization of technology. By questioning own acquired/ developed identity, Premec points to a horrifying fact accepted as an affiliated social norm – where humanity and human mistakes are interpreted with negative connotation whereas artificial, mechanical perfectness and robotized behaviour are being favoured.

Next to the four finalists the jury wants to draw the public attention to works of Igor Sovilj and Borjana Mrđa who both tackle questions of gender inequality and sexist stereotypes within the sphere of the media. Sovilj, exploits popular social network Facebook by taking over a female identity, exercising feministic interventions in hyper-realistic space of certain religious communities, while Borjana Mrđa alarms to interaction of politics and pornography in media space, by placing their relationship in a symbiotic, even harmonious affairs. Jury also reflected on work of Bojana Tamindžija who positions the matter of individual identity in to the context of a collective, where the individual, by indentifying with etno/national symbols is led into the position of absurd.

Sarajevo, 18.septembar 2010.