The ZVONO Award 2011

ZVONO (the BELL) Award, a member of the network of the Annual Young Visual Artists Award (Yvaa), started in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 2006 as an ongoing project organized by the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in collaboration with the Foundation for Civil Society and the Trust for Mutual Understanding (New York,USA). Local partners have been the Museum for Contemporary Art RS and the Protok Collective, (Banja Luka).

The Foundation for a Civil Society (FCS) with affiliates in ten countries in Central Europe and the Balkans (Czech Republic, Slovakia,  Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia,  Albania and Bulgaria) has organized an international fellowship award program for young visual artists from the region.

This project, named the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, was established by Václav Havel and a group of artists in Czechoslovakia in 1990. Their goal was to create a prestigious award in Czechoslovakia that would recognize young artists under 35 and expose them to the international art scene.

Since ’90s, the successful Chalupecký Award model has been replicated within the whole network: a transparent competition for artists under 35 decided by an independent and changing jury, an exhibition of the award finalists at a prestigious gallery or museum, an award ceremony, and a travel fellowship to the United States, followed by a solo exhibition of the winner upon his/her return. For the past several years, the residency in the United States  consists of a six-week stay in New York with a studio at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) for each of the winning artists. The Foundation for a Civil Society administers the residencies and the Trust for Mutual Understanding has been their dedicated founder since the beginning of the Chalupecký Award.

In each participating country, the Award is named after one person or artist group that made important contribution to the development in the field of modern or contemporary art. SCCA decided that the name of the Award in BiH would be ZVONO as a tribute to the artist group formed in Sarajevo in 1982 and active until the outbreak of war in 1992. The group was named after the Zvono café (Zvono/ the Bell) in which these artists used to meet. Not yet accepted and recognized into the infrastructure of the existing art system, they started to exhibit and present their works and performances in the most out-of-the-ordinary places: in bars, in the streets, in stadiums and shop-windows. That’s how they introduced a new artistic practice on the local art scene.

The members of the 2011 Jury are: Dunja Kukovec (Ljubljana), Irfan Hošić (Bihać), Miodrag Manojlović (Banja Luka), Pau Cata (Barcelona) and Adela Jušić (Sarajevo – 2010 ZVONO  Award Winner).

Finalists: Radenko Milak, Lana Čmajčanin, Igor Sovilj, and Sandra Dukić and Boris Glamočanin.
Winner: Sandra Dukić and Boris Glamočanin

ZVONO is supported (sporadically) by the Ministries for culture in BiH and the French, Spanish and German Embassies in BiH.