Od mesta do mesta / From a City to a City (International Online Conference)

Moderator: Irena Borić

PROGRAM (pdf) in slo an eng

The conference focused on the issue of migration through the lenses of a broader idea of transmigration. As such it included a variety of migrative aspects – from nomadic, fugitive, settling, or circulating for several reasons, be it political, economic, or social. Starting from understanding by architect Ana Dana Beroš that: “Transmigrancy is, not defined exclusively in terms of crossing political and nowadays physical borders of Europe, but also by activating the mechanisms of otherness, which are equally present in the countries of arrival and departure.”, the conference brought together various critical, curatorial and art endeavors looking into those mechanisms of otherness. The conference exposed historical  and present urgencies behind migrative processes, its temporarity or permanence, its economic, political and social conditioning and how these entangle with notions of popular culture, racism, discrimination, image representation, and with physical and psyhological borders.

By posing questions: Can art representation contribute to the shift of current migrant policies?  Can it make shifts among consciousness of the people? the conference attempted to create shared virtual space in which the speakers think the idea of transmigration together.

After a brief introduction by Irena Borić, the first speaker writer Orit Gat gave a lecture entitled From Afar. Football, migration, and a sense of belonging.
In the lecture she looked at football (soccer) as a prism through which to explore questions about immigration, nationalism, race, gender, money, love, and the possibility of belonging. In the talk she included a short reading from a book in progress and a personal account of watching football from afar as a child, and how it became a promise of an elsewhere.

Orit Gat is a writer living in London, whose writing about art and digital culture has appeared in magazines including frieze, ArtReview, the LA Review of Books, the World Policy Journal, and The White Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is a winner of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is currently working her first book, titled If Anything Happens, which looks at football (soccer) as a prism through which to explore questions about immigration, nationalism, race, gender, money, love, and the possibility of belonging.

 

The lecture was followed by lecture by artist Sandra Sterle entitled We invite you to go home.
The artist presented her project go_Home, developed by Sandra Sterle and Danica Dakić from September to December 2001 as part of an ArtsLink residency in New York. This project, for which the two artists decided to relocate to New York and live together for a four-month period, probes the elusive logic of belonging and the idea of a multiply located instead of a fixed community. In go_Home these artists from ex-Yugoslavia used the real space of their residence and the virtual home of the Internet (which served as a site for video and photographic experimentation, transatlantic texts, recipes, a calendar of events, and a chat room), to address both the dialectical relationship between home and elsewhere, and the porous concept of identity sensitive to multiple attachments.

Sandra Sterle (Zadar, Croatia, 1965) graduated at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and continued her studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf at the Department of Film and Video. From 1991 to 2000 lived and worked in Amsterdam, where she was awarded funds and commissions for her work. In 2001 she started teaching New Media, followed by Performance and Art in Context at the Film and Video Department of the Art Academy of the University of Split. Her works were exhibited, performed, and presented at numerous domestic and international art institutions. Her works are part of several public archives and collections of MMSU, Rijeka, Art Gallery, Split and private collections. The space of her work traverses across the real and virtual geographies, in which she establishes fluid identity configurations and continuously searches for the new social, biological, and communicative patterns.

 

The lecture was followed by lecture-performance by duo Doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran) entitled Beneath a Starless Sky, As Dark and Thick As Ink.
In it, Doplgenger intervened into footage of Yugoslav television that recorded the processes of Yugoslav labor migration to the Western European countries in the 1960s and the export of Yugoslav technology to the Non-Aligned Countries in the early 1970s. Different approaches in media representation of these processes revealed various subtexts, aiding an understanding of the wider economical, historical and ideological context.

DOPLGENGER is an artist duo Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran from Belgrade. Doplgenger engages as a film/video artist, researcher, writer, and curator. The work of Doplgenger deals with the relation between art and politics through exploring the regimes of moving images and modes of its reception. They rely on the tradition of experimental film and video. Through some of the actions of these traditions, they intervene in the existing media products or produce new in the expanded cinema forms. Their work has been shown internationally at institutions such are the Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Osage Gallery in Hong Kong, etc. Films of Doplgenger have been screened and selected for film festivals like International Film Festival Rotterdam, Seattle International Film Festival, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Cairo Video Festival, Festival Images Contre Nature in Marseille, among others. Doplgenger is the recipient of the Serbian Politika Award for Best Exhibition in 2015.
www.doplgenger.org

 

The following lecture was delivered by photographer Davor Konjikušić entitled The problem of the artistic approach to the topic of migration – depoliticization or production of knowledge.
The artist presented his works Holy People, You Can’t Send a Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea, We Want To Love You Art, Aura: F37 and Our House to explain the methodology he used in artist research and the realization of works on the topic of migration. He addresed the issues surrounding photographic representation that often doesn’t produce compassion, empathy and solidarity. He emhasised that photographs can’t be viewed outside of the context in which they were created as well as the captions that accompany them so photographic medium is demanding and problematic when it comes to the representation of the topic of migrations. Issues of objectification, ethics, artistic approach, and distribution of works are just some of the issues that artists encounter while working on these topics.

Davor Konjikušić was born in 1979. He holds Mag. art. degree in photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, where he has also completed his BA studies in cinematography. His work uses photography as a primary medium in articulating his artistic concept, in which he explores the relationships between public and private, intimate, and socio-political. In his artistic practice, Konjikusic combines photography with text, archive, found objects, and video. He has been interested in the role of the photographic medium in establishing power and control relations. He teaches photography at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, Croatia.

 

The concluding lecture was given by curators Andreja Hribernik in Maja Antončič by the title Borderlines. The curators presented the project Borderlines they are currently developing.
The project was organized at the anniversary of the Carinthian plebiscite, but addresses a broader topic and the emergence of borders in general. It is an international exhibition project that has been extended due to the coronavirus situation and is developing an unexpected content continuity and, through it, greater depth. Ideologically, it stems from the reflection that physical demarcations and walls are being rebuilt unexpectedly today, as we are witnessing both in Europe and in other parts of the world. Individual authoritarian mechanisms are re-emerging that do not take into account the fact that the image of the world has changed precisely at the expense of the struggles of the past and that new formulas of social policies need to be found within state systems that will not demarcate, separate and discriminate.

Maja Antončič is a curator at the Center for Contemporary Arts of the Celeia Institute in Celje. She graduated from the two-subject study of Art History and Librarianship at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. After that, she graduated from the School of Curators and Critics of Contemporary Art Svet umetnosti/The world of Art at the Institute for Contemporary Art SCCA-Ljubljana. At CSU, he leads an educational program, prepares exhibition projects related to various current topics of contemporary art, and researches the development and phenomena of the local art community.

Andreja Hribernik has been the director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec since 2013. She graduated in International Relations from the Faculty of Social Sciences and obtained her Ph. D. in the historical anthropology of the graphic from ISH in 2016. In her work, she focuses on museums, their utopian dimension, and the heritage of socialism. In 2017, she was named the curator of the national pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia.