Conceptual Art
Missing Identity
A project of the Contemporary Art Institute, EXIT, Peja, in cooperation with the Laboratory for Visual Arts and the Center for Humanistic Studies Gani Bobi, Kosovo.http://www.e-cart.ro/7/erzen/uk/g/erzen-shkololli_uk.html
http://www.projekt-relations.de/en/explore/missing_identity/index.php
Exception (Odstupanje) - Young Artists from Prishtine, Exhibition in Belgrade and Novi Sad
Organisers of the exhibition wanted to create a platform for people in Serbia to think about Kosovo in a different way, rather than as a territory of their spiritual heritage and the roots of their national identity.Read more:
http://victims.labforculture.org/site/texts/force-of-trauma
www.red-thread.org/en/article.asp?a=22
Source or Website: www.kontekstgalerija.org/pdf_08/odstupanje.pdf
De/construction of Monument, Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art
Link: http://www.projekt-relations.de/en/explore/deconstruction/index.phpMasao Okabe: “Is There a Future for Our Past? The Dark Face of the Light”, at the Japanese pavil
The work comprised over 1400 individual footage that Okabe obtained with pencil and paper of specific areas of Hiroshima that were devastated in the bombing.More: http://www.jpf.go.jp/venezia-biennale/art/e/52/index.html
The Disappeared: Art Born of the Need to Tell
An exhibition by contemporary artists from Latin America who are making art about the Disappeared.
These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The Museum's exhibition, called The Disappeared, is the first of its kind to be organized specifically about this subject.
The word "disappeared" was newly defined during the mid-20th century by the military dictatorships in Latin America. "Disappear" evolved into a noun, describing those members of the resistance who were kidnapped, tortured and killed by the military, especially in the 1970s in countries like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. Colombia with its fifty-year civil war and Guatemala with its thirty-seven year civil war further expanded the meaning of "disappear."
In the mid-1990s Laurel Reuter, Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, began to find significant and moving works made by artists personally touched by the horrors of civil war in Latin America. Much of this memory-based work will be included in the exhibition. Through their art, the artists fight amnesia in their own countries by forcing people to remember as a stay against such atrocities happening again.
The Disappeared, curated by Laurel Reuter, opened at the Museum in 2005. Since then it has toured to five Latin American countries and four American cities.
Source or Website: www.ndmoa.com/pastex/disappeared/index.html
“Our death/Other’s dinner” by Flaka Haliti
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Flaka Haliti on her work “Our death/Other’s dinner”:
"It sounds only like a phrase in our place, but it is much more than that. It is a moment when Albanian families get together again, bringing back the social and traditional solidarity, but unfortunately even this time it is about a tragic moment for someone. For centuries within Albanian families, during the occasion of death and mourning, relatives would bring lunch and the others would bring dinner prepared in their homes to the bereaved house to share the pain.
Now we have a different case: this phrase is transferred into the opposite connotation of what it was used for before...."
[More on the external website]
Source or Website: www.memory-culture-art.org/artists/flaka_haliti.html
Milica Tomic: Politics of Memory; Curatorial by Albert Heta
Milica Tomic: Politics of MemoryCuratorial by Albert Heta
11/09/2007 - 8/10/2007
Opening: September 11th 2007, 20.00h.
Location: stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina
The exhibition Politics of Memory, a curatorial work by Albert Heta is structured on two works by Milica Tomic: The Belgrade Monument (2002- ) work of a group of artists 'The Monument' part of which is Milica Tomic, and her other work 'Container' (2004-2006).
This is the first solo exhibition of Milica Tomic in the territory of ex-Yugoslavia since 1998.
The project 'The Belgrade Monument' is a work which discusses the challenges that artists community faced on opposing the fabrication of a history, that now didn't have to do with them anymore, and even with the times that they lived during the 90ties. By the end of 2001, the City Council for Monuments of Belgrade, agrees with the initiative to build a memorial for all the heroes of the 1990-1999. With an Open call for the Memorial, a joint debate starts concerning politics and art in Serbia. For this purpose a discussion group was created called 'The memorial'. After revising the Open Call including other organizations and Associations into the discussion (Association of war invalids, Association of war fighters from 1990 and Association of parents of the died soldiers from NATO bombing) it was decided to be suspended (December 2002).
This public debate has draw the intention to a wider public, the issue began being discussed in radios, televisions, critical and polemic writings in journals and also contributions from different electronic web portals.
This discussion on Memorial continued until May of 2006, where the issue of building the Memorial takes the dimension of urban planning 'Landscape - Park'.
Container is artistic project, developed on the idea of reconstructing the crime, a crime that happened in North Afghanistan. A massacre of 8.500 Taliban, slaves during the American invasion. The slaves were put in the truck container and have been held there without water and air, for several days. When they asked for some air, the American ally troops started to shoot in the direction of the container with the intention to create some holes through which the 'fresh air' would come in. the process of reconstructing this crime was done in different places like Belgrade, Sidney and England.
By simulating this crime the discussion on global violence, hypocrisy of American wars in the name of democracy and anti-terrorism opens by default.
Source or Website: www.stacion.org/index.php?cid=2,2,53&mode=article
Ghosts of Dreams Deferred
Ghosts of Dreams Deferred depicts the condition of being haunted by ghosts of a past that is yet vibrant and resemble hissing for a loss that instead could be of a joyful present moment. The exhibition brings together five different practices, thus works that expand the conceptual framework in the way in which the concept of the exhibition is taken towards an expansion of resemblances and associations.Societies, individuals, and personas, in ontological sense, live with the continuous production of desire and with the drive to embody their dreams. Passion as a strong impulse may wither away by the immense accumulation of disappointments and failures of beholding the dreams to come true. As failure is not the ultimate end, but the consequence of the loss of trust in one’s engagement to political, economical, psychological, emotional and social domains; it leads to viciously circulating state of complication. That is to say, it leads to a complicated state of mind where the present moment is continuously defined by the traumatic.
Hence, ghosts resemble, reiterate, and almost re-enact the experience of the trauma. In other words, ghosts are the metaphorical iconography of the traumatic, which is in the nature of personhoods (rationale of societies, characteristics of individuals).
Ghosts of Dreams Deferred is a ground for activating the complication of personhoods, societies at their rationale; presupposes that haunting is a social phenomenon rather than an individual psychosis nor a pre-modern superstition; hence it investigates the potentiality of radical political, social and emotional change. That is to say, it implements change, which is possible only through flourishing of new forms of subjectivity and sociality.
Source or Website: www.stacion.org/index.php?cid=2,2,101&mode=article
DICTIONARY OF WAR
DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an “analyzer of power relations” that constitutes current changes.
DICTIONARY OF WAR consists of a stringent concept on three levels:
1. Presentation
Every concept will be presented in twenty minutes, the conceptual personae may use this period as they wish. At least twenty-five concepts will be created per event in this way. The formulation and selection of the respective concept, the determination of its content, and the decision with regard to the format and mode of the lecture is incumbent on the conceptual persona invited. The concepts will be presented in alphabetical order over two days, each day session lasting approximately seven-hours. The stage set is adapted to the respective premises but will be founded on a concept, as yet to be devised, that will be based on a few recurrent elements that the conceptual persona may arrange in the period available. The respective concepts and conceptual personae will be announced by an off-stage speaker. The speakers will be accompanied onto the stage by a host, who will be available throughout for support, e.g. with technical matters.
2. Documentation
All created concepts will be documented. Two video cameras and a video mixer will be available for this throughout the events. The aim of the documentation is to make the lectures available on the Internet, and as such accountable and reproducable beyond the actual event. The documentation is explicitly not about creating another independent artistic contribution. However, such contributions may of course be submitted as supplements or additional material. If possible, the conceptual personae are asked to provide their manuscript. The documentation may also feature additional material exceeding the twenty-minute time-frame. The video recordings of the presentations will be published under a creative commons licence on the Web shortly after the events. They will thus be available as material for ongoing editing, comment and discussion, although, of course, always referring back to the original contribution and its conceptual persona.
3. Publication
Following the four DICTIONARY OF WAR events, a book will be published by Merve-Verlag, Berlin, to present the 100 concepts, appropriately adapted by the author where necessary, in printed form.
Source or Website: dictionaryofwar.org/idea
