| art.description.project | I was invited by Sarita Vujković, PhD, Commissioner of the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republic of Srpska to curated the National Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at La Biennale di Venezia - The 57th International Art Exhibition.
La Biennale di Venezia is the oldest and most prestigious exhibition of its kind internationally, and i curated this exhibition together with my colleagues Christopher Yggdre, Sinziana Ravini, Anna van der Vliet, and Hans Urlich Obrist.
Where as my curatoral and role centered around the the research of the theme, choices of the international artists Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena, Loulou Cherinet, Lamine Fofana, Geraldine Juárez, Joel Danielsson, Nils Bech, Ida Ekblad, and the development conceptualisation and theoritisation of the initial proposal by artist Radenko Milak and Christopher Yggdre, my role as an editor in-chief of Paletten Art Journal in this artistic research project was to develop a new relation between Paletten Art Journal is an artistic research based art journal.
The idea was to work with the notion of critical appendix, as method to challange the conventional relations between an art journal and an art exhibition. One reason for this is that Paletten Art Journal is not a ”journalistic” product or a traditional ”review” art magazine. It is an artistic research based project, that constantly try to invent new forms of art writing and art works in the form of a journal. To work with the notion of the critical appendix made it possible to not produce a traditional catalogue kind of journal, or create use the journal as a platform for critically reflect on the exhibition project, The university of disaster.
This special issue on disaster and desire, made in conjuntion with the exhibtion University of disaser, created a new relation between the form and tradition of the art journal and a contemporary art exibition. The critical appendix as a methological guide, made it possible to create knew unexpected spaces for critical reflections that would not have been possible with the context of this exhibition. This issue is a great contribution to the knowledge about how we can understand an contemorary art journal. A method that let the exhibition ”pass though” the journal, and let the journal ”pass though” the exhibition. Beside its strong individual and collective contributions to the knowledge on disaster and desire, in retrospect the greatest research achievement in this project i think has to do with the art journal as form.
This project is contributing to our understanding of how the relation between a an art exhibition and an art journal can be developed beyond the idea that the an journal or the exhibition being needs to be an illustration of, or a critique of each other, but something else, for the future to define.
Kate Sutton wrote, in Artforum International about this unique project:
” In another cross-national project, Bosnia and Herzegovina hosted the “University of Disaster,” an initiative of artist Radenko Milak in collaboration with the congenial crew at Paletten, the Swedish art journal fronted by writer Fredrik Svensk and curator Sinziana Ravini. On the top floor of the palazzo, Milak’s gorgeous watercolors and hand-drawn animations of events like Chernobyl and Hiroshima may have set the tone, but from there, “disaster” took on extravagant interpretations. Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Oculus Rift animation Dickgirl 3D(X), 2016, endowed viewers with magnificent breasts and an electric-blue plasma phallus used to repeatedly penetrate a giant chortling sex potato. I tried to avert my eyes from the bobbling mass, but the goggles wouldn’t let me look away. The most effective representation of disaster may have been the most intimate: Echo, a searing performance by Nils Bech staged in a tiny makeshift bedroom covered in a quilt of Ida Ekblad paintings. Curled up beside a small effigy on the bed, Bech drizzled his limoncello vocals over the room, crooning on loop: “It’s all over now . . , It’s all over now.” There wasn’t a dry eye (or an unbroken heart) in the room”
(link below).
This nationally and internationally unique artistic research based editorial project was an integrated part in my ongoing research project on the biopolitical aspects of contemporary art and critique. | sv |
