Touring residency programme with Igor Bošnjak 2016 – 2020

Touring residency programme with Igor Bošnjak
2016 – 2020
MMSU / Marseille (France), Novi Sad (Serbia),
Budapest (Hungary) and Maribor (Slovenia)

Within the Touring residency programme of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, international jury with members from MMSU Rijeka, ZINC Marseille and ACAX Budapest chose Igor Bošnjak, artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina for participation in Touring residency programme.

Selected artist is travelling to four locations during the programme – Marseille (France), Novi Sad (Serbia), Budapest (Hungary) and Maribor (Slovenia).

So far, Igor Bošnjak visited first two locations where he conducted his research and art project, in collaboration with local partner organizations and migrant communities.

Marseille, France

Excerpt from artist’s report:

My project Imaginary Land on Sand was implemented with the migrant community of Marseille as part of the workshop involving migrants from various countries: Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, Colombia, Tunisia, Chile and the Republic of South Africa. The imaginary state or territory is created and designed in the form of animation on a terrain sand based on the drawings of the participants on the workshop. In its form it got quite an unusual and interesting form. As I stated in the application:

In joint communication we will create animation which is their imaginary view on promise land, as geographical map, and later we will project it on relief map created from dust and sand. Sand in this case is symbol or metaphorical meaning for something temporary or transient, which is not stable, or fix. We project dreams or ideas on something that is very fragile and transiency…

On the links below there are recordings where the whole process of preparing and producing the work can be seen. The first video is the process itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8vBhhHjCds, while the other one shows how colorfull HD projections on sand terrain with variable dimensions about 2m x 1.3 m looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrhu434BsSc.

Igor Bošnjak also made a video titled 76828 through which he compares pictures of Marseille from the past with the contemporary pictures of Marseille: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GMtiX2VJ_Y.

2. Novi Sad, Serbia

Excerpt from artist’s report:

During the April residential residence in Novi Sad, within the framework of the Risk Change project, I continued the realization of the current project Imaginary Land on Sand. Thanks to the excellent cooperation with people from MSUV, I managed to install a new installation as a small exhibition and produce two new works. The new work I realized at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina is a large spatial installation with a projection on the sand, installation with two televisions as well as a new big animation, projection. The name of the new work ie. new productions are: You can hide memories, but you can not erase the history that produces them. The title of the article is the quote of Haruki Murakami and the work symbolizes and presents the metaphor of the current situation regarding the relations between the European continent and the migrant crisis, both at the collective and the individual level. The work consists of a projection of the waveforms projected on the sand. The work is a haptic audio-visual installation. More details can be seen on the attached photos. After the end of the residential stay, team from MSUV organized guidance for my art project, as well as a talk show, where I exchanged ideas with the audience and talked about the new production and my current artistic and theoretical practice with an informal conversation.