September 09, 2013

Interruption: 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana

Interruption is the 30th edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, structured as a complex mix of representation and discourse, which is the outcome and sum of the concepts, content and social networks created by the Biennial's almost 60-year-old tradition. Today The Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana is seen as one of the print biennials that has most radically expanded the borders of the medium and redefined the concept of the fine art print and printmaking. It has gradually shifted its understanding of the autonomous nature of the print from a strictly technical definition to, primarily, the communicative potential of the graphic medium. The curator of the Biennial main exhibition, Deborah Cullen, has selected 42 artists among which some return to basic, even primal, forms of image reproduction, while others embrace the random, fractured and endless virtual world.
Interruption explores the graphic as both form and content, in an invigorated terrain that, looking both backward and forward, links the work of diverse contemporary artists from around the world. Printerly processes touch many types of present-day art. Select, traditional media have evolved and adapted to maintain their relevance, while digital processes, after a long fermentation, have finally taken legitimate hold as artistic tools in their own right. Interruption surveys the extension of traditional as well as new approaches to printmaking in response to our 21st-century communications.

Curator: Deborah Cullen

Participating artists:
Allora & Calzadilla, Burak Arıkan, Dennis Ashbaugh & William Ford Gibson, Tammam Azzam, Xu Bing, Luis Camnitzer, caraballo-farman, Alex Cerveny, Mario Čaušić, Vuk Ćosić, Milos Djordjevic, Tomás Espina, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze Gianluigi Scarpa, Mihael Giba, Ana Golici, María Elena González, Meta Grgurevič and Urša Vidic, Dragan IIic, Sanela Jahić, Charles Juhász-Alvarado, Thomas Kilpper, André Komatsu, Gorazd Krnc, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Nicola López, Ivan Marušić Klif, Yucef Merhi, Ottjörg A.C., Renata Papišta, Adam Pendleton, Agnieszka Polska, Zoran Poposki, Marjetica Potrč, Gerhard Richter, Venelin Shurelov, Dario Šolman, Nika Špan, Teo Spiller, Waltraut Tänzler, Rirkrit Tiravanija,Vargas-Suarez Universal and Tomas Vu-Daniel.

September 05, 2013

Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana


14 September–24 November 2013
Pre-opening day: Friday 13 September
Opening: Friday 13 September, 7pm, in front of the International Centre of Graphic Arts
Mednarodni grafični likovni center / International Centre of Graphic Arts
Grad Tivoli, Pod turnom 3,
1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 
T +386 (0)1 241 38 00
F +386 (0)1 241 38 21
info@mglc-lj.si
www.mglc-lj.si

Interruption is the 30th edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. This installation considers the evolutionary graphic field of contemporary times. Printerly processes touch many types of present-day art. Select, traditional media have evolved and adapted to maintain their relevance, while digital processes, after a long fermentation, have finally taken legitimate hold as artistic tools in their own right.Interruption surveys the extension of traditional as well as new approaches to printmaking in response to our 21st-century communications.

The curator of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana is Deborah Cullen, Director and chief curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York.

Participating artists: 
Allora & Calzadilla, Burak Arıkan, Dennis Ashbaugh & William Ford Gibson, Tammam Azzam, Xu Bing, Luis Camnitzer, caraballo-farman, Alex Cerveny, Mario Čaušić, Vuk Ćosić, Milos Djordjevic, Tomás Espina, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze Gianluigi Scarpa, Mihael Giba, Ana Golici, María Elena González, Meta Grgurevič and Urša Vidic, Dragan IIic, Sanela Jahić, Charles Juhász-Alvarado, Thomas Kilpper, André Komatsu, Gorazd Krnc, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Nicola López, Ivan Marušić Klif, Yucef Merhi, Ottjörg A.C., Renata Papišta, Adam Pendleton, Agnieszka Polska, Zoran Poposki, Marjetica Potrč, Gerhard Richter, Venelin Shurelov, Dario Šolman, Nika Špan, Teo Spiller, Waltraut Tänzler, Rirkrit Tiravanija,Vargas-Suarez Universal and Tomas Vu-Daniel.

The works included in the Biennial echo and comment on the conditions of the world in which we live: how we receive our information, how we interact—or attempt to—with each other, how we (mis)perceive our world. Clamouring, unfiltered data bombards us. Masquerading commercial and political agendas vie for our attention alongside personal thoughts and images that are more than we can ever possibly absorb. The hyperactivity of text and image begs for our attention. While some artists respond by returning to basic, even primal, forms of image reproduction (fire, shadows, tattoos, gunshots), others embrace the randomness of social media picture boards, the ghostliness of heat-sensitive live-feed video, endless streams of leaked governmental documents, or the brief haikus of the Twittersphere.

Interruption considers both the fresh application of traditional means by leading-edge artists and the innovative incorporation of new printerly technologies in fine-art investigations. Both approaches contemplate our contemporary transmissions as the basis of their works. Interruption explores the graphic as both form and content, in an invigorated polygraphic terrain that links the work of diverse contemporary artists from around the world. 

The following exhibitions are also part of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts:

Exhibition of the history of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts:
The Biennial of Graphic Arts – Serving You Since 1955 
The exhibition features archival television footage, personal testimonies and memoirs, letters and other documents that reveal the Biennial’s journey through nearly six decades, with a focus on selected aspects from past exhibitions. Curated by Petja Grafenauer.

Exhibition of the Grand Prize Winner of the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts:
Regina José Galindo: The Anatomy Lesson 
The Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo works in the field of performance, often responding in her art to current socio-political situations, as we saw presented at the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts. This year’s retrospective exhibition takes us on a journey through the poetics of the artist’s oeuvre. Curated by Yasmín Martín Vodopivec. 

Exhibition of the Honorable Mention of the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts:
Miklós Erdély: The Original and the Copy + Indigo Drawings 
Miklós Erdély (1928–1986)—artist, architect, writer, poet, and filmmaker—was a major figure in the neo-avant-garde and conceptual art of Hungary. The exhibition of Erdély’s photographic works, indigo works and drawings has been organised with the co-operation of the Miklós Erdély Foundation (EMA). Curated by Annamária Szőke.

Venues of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts: The International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), The Museum of Modern Art plus the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MG+MSUM), The Cankarjev Dom Gallery, The Jakopič Gallery – The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML)            

The 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts is on view from 14 September to 24 November 2013, Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm.

In conjunction with the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts there will be a one-day international conference: “Password: Printmaking” (18 October, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana).

September 04, 2013

Translation(s) in Denmark and Canada

After its premiere at the Hong Kong ArtWalk Extra this spring and the ART STAYS International Festival of Contemporary Art in Slovenia this summer, the international video project Translation(s) curated by Laurence Wood and Zoran Poposki will be screened in the programme of the 5th edition of NotFestival in Copenhagen, Denmark, from from September 16-21, 2013, at The Danish National School of Performing Arts (Statens Scenekunstskole).
Photo courtesy: NotFestival2013
"The Not Festival is a kaleidoscopic, ephemeral, erratic and nomadic artistic object. It embraces the ideas of global artistic collaboration and the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, DIY attitudes.Through the use of old and new artistic approaches, technologies and media it exists outside the realm of the establishment, which implies generally non-existing financial support. However, its inclusive nature allows it to move inside and outside of institutions and at the same time avoid the institutional restrictions. This political “object” aims to fight the standardized and systematized commodification of the arts. Thus, it is NOT a FESTIVAL."

Featuring works by Arnold J. Kemp, Tricia Sellmer, Lucy Harrison, Daniel Arnaldo-Roman, Zoran Poposki, Laurence Wood, Luis Lara Malvacias, Tessie Word and Damon Ayers, Victoria Hindley, and Eva Petric, Translation(s) consider the centerless chronotope of global negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures as an emerging network of new pathways of translation between multiple formats of expression and communication. Through a variety of approaches to video, the artists featured in this project explore the dynamic interplay between the global and the local on a concrete, material level.

The Danish National School of Performing Arts (Statens Scenekunstskole) is the main educational institution in Denmark within the fields of acting, dance, choreography, scenography, light and sound design, musical accompaniment for dance, dance partnership, production and stage management and props design.
Photo courtesy: Chazou Gallery
Simultaneously with the Copenhagen festival, Translation(s) will also be on show at the Chazou Gallery in Kamloops, BC, Canada, from September 18 to October 18, 2013. 

July 11, 2013

Interventions Journal

Zoran Poposki's current artistic research is featured in the Spring 2013 – Volume 2, Issue 2 of Interventions Journal, the online journal of Columbia University's graduate program in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA).
Interventions is conceptualized as a curatorial platform featuring essays, interviews, web-based art projects, and experimental investigations of the implicit cross-sections between these practices. Flexible in format, the project aims to cultivate dialogue amongst a diverse body of participants including curators, artists, and art and architectural historians in order to establish a common space and archive of exchange.

Launched in 2011, Interventions is currently edited by Carmen Falcioni, Carmen Ferreyra, and Cecelia Thornton-Alson. In their Editor's Letter, they state:

"With an emphasis on artists’ projects, this issue of Interventions investigates our post-simulacral condition. Photography and film—traditionally indexical media—document that which never was. Found images are re-appropriated in the creation of a fictive archive. Legends are literalized, rumors are propagated, and fanciful connections are made as artists involve themselves in made-up experiences of real-life figures, constructing narratives using photographic documentation. A parallel universe operates under complementary logic. The icon, the index, and the symbol play semiotic games. Imagined and real landscapes are mapped onto each other. Real and fictional spatiotemporalities are conflated and communication across worlds is enabled by technology.
We now understand truth as a plural construct, acknowledging that no document is a transparent copy and that all representation comprises a set of political relationships. All documents carry the conditions of their own production and distribution: they are traces of their own construction. Uniquely positioned to undermine objectivity, fiction provides a means through which to critically engage the structure of our composite reality."

June 20, 2013

Exhibition in New York


Chelsea: Viridian Artists Inc. is pleased to present their 24th International Juried Exhibition. Curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator, Whitney Museum, New York, the exhibition opens July 2nd and continues through July 20th, 2013. In celebration, a special reception will be held on Thursday, July 18th 6:00 - 8:00 pm. 

Artists: Lizz Aston, Ed Herman, Samaray Akarvardar, Jane Alexander-Perry, Ransom Ashley, Bob Augstell, Kathleen Benton, S Brian Berkun, Elizabeth Castonguay, Alexander Churchill, Malika Cosme, Henry Coupe, Barry Goldberg, John Hansen, Edith Hillinger, Aram Han, Timothy Macy, Dana McElroy, Pilar Olaverri, Zoran Poposki, Leonard Rosenfeld, Kimberly Rowe, Seena Sussman, Tore Terrasi, Rebecca Treadwell, Susan Smith Trees, Catherine Vanaria, Andrew Williams.

In her curatorial statement, Sussman states: “New York City, considers itself, rightly or wrongly, the center of the art world. In the week when the jurying of this exhibition took place, another art fair, Frieze, was in town, the contemporary auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were bringing in tons of money and mega galleries in Chelsea were featuring gigantic shows of globally branded artists. Jurying an exhibition like Viridian’s at that time was an essential activity, a relief from the horrifying realization that, at least in New York, little separates the art world from global financial markets and the entertainment industry.”

Elisabeth Sussman was recently awarded the sixteenth CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence in recognition for her dynamic curatorial vision and her dedication to the field. She is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, along with co-curator Jay Sanders, she curated the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Viridian's International Juried Exhibitions are a series of exhibitions that serve to encompass a diverse selection of outstanding art from around the world that might not otherwise be seen in New York City. This marks the 24th year that the gallery has offered artists the opportunity to have a major museum curator see a selection of their work.

June 15, 2013

Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art

After the screening at the Hong Kong Science Park this spring as part of Hong Kong ArtWalk Extra this spring, the international video project Translation(s) curated by Laurence Wood and Zoran Poposki will be presented in the official programme of the 11th edition of ART STAYS International Festival of Contemporary Art in Ptuj, Slovenia, from July 24 to September 1, 2013.

ART STAYS is one of the most active contemporary art institutions in Slovenia today. Since 2003, ART STAYS and its International Festival of Contemporary Art has played a leading role in bringing an international vibrancy to the city’s art scene, showing for the first time in Slovenia the works of artists such as Fernando Prats, Ivan Navarro, Yoko Ono, Leo Ferdinand Demetz, Regina Jose Galindo, Ilona Nemeth, Elisa Rossi, Kensuke Koike, Angelo Volpe, Igor Molin, Raphael Di Luzio, Florian Langemaack, Tim Roeloffs, Marek Schovanek, Sissa Micheli, Peter Wehinger and many others.

"2012 was a landmark year for the Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art. We celebrated our 10th anniversary and played an important role in the European Capital of Culture Maribor 2012, which brought much attention to the exceptional cultural offer of Ptuj. This year we are back with a programme full of new events: from local to international, from large-scale to intimate. The 2013 festival includes projects that outline the current situation in the world of contemporary, especially visual art. We named it EXPOSE on purpose, as we do not wish to give it a common thread other than to show the diversity of contemporary art of the world. The festival’s audience is varied and Ptuj is not a large city, so creating narrowly focused projects would not bring the desired results. Over 25,000 people visited the festival last year and we hope that the number will be even higher this year", says Jernej Forbici, the festival's Art Director.
Featuring works by Arnold J. Kemp, Tricia Sellmer, Lucy Harrison, Daniel Arnaldo-Roman, Zoran Poposki, Laurence Wood, Luis Lara Malvacias, Tessie Word and Damon Ayers, Victoria Hindley, and Eva Petric, Translation(s) consider the centerless chronotope of global negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures as an emerging network of new pathways of translation between multiple formats of expression and communication. Through a variety of approaches to video, the artists featured in this project explore the dynamic interplay between the global and the local on a concrete, material level.

June 05, 2013

Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts

Zoran Poposki's work has been selected to appear in Interruption: 30th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts from 14 September to 24 November 2013. The 30th anniversary edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, one of the oldest biennials in the world, is curated by Deborah Cullen, Director and Chief Curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York City.

Zoran Poposki, Hong Kong Atlas 4, 2012-13
Poposki will present a series of archival pigment prints on canvas and screen printed in acrylic paint, as part of the larger project "Hong Kong Atlas" combining psychogeography, photography, printmaking and video to explore cultural translation and transcoding.

The producer of Ljubljana’s International Biennial of Graphic Arts is the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana, a museum specializing in the art of printing, artists’ books and ephemera. The main presentation of the Biennial will take place in the MGLC and the Moderna Gallery, but there will be concurrent exhibitions in various spaces around the city, including an historical overview of the Biennial, and a project dedicated to Regina José Galindo, who won the jury award in the last edition. This event will also have a juried prize that is a solo project presented in the next edition.

The thirtieth edition of the Biennial will be an occasion for some serious self-reflection. It will explore the idea of evolution, highlighting some of the transformations and underlying endurance the expanded graphic field has undergone over the last half-century. A renewed contemporary engagement with traditional means and the re-thinking of vintage processes and forms has invigorated the polygraphic terrain around the world. It will offer an insight into the global biennialisation of the art system.

The curator of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Dr. Deborah Cullen is director and chief curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York. In 2012, she was chief curator of the triennial El Panal/The Hive: 3ra Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe in Puerto Rico. Before that, she was director of curatorial programmes at El Museo del Barrio in New York, where she edited the extensive 500-page anthology Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World (El Museo del Barrio and Yale University Press, 2012). Among her major exhibitions are Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (2009), Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer (2010) and the international travelling project entitled Arte no es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 (2008–2011), for which she received the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. She is the author of a monograph on Rafael Ferrer (UCLA, 2012).

May 30, 2013

International Juried Competition

Zoran Poposki's work "Hong Kong Atlas 3" has been selected to be exhibited in Viridian Artists Inc. Twenty-fourth International Juried Exhibition. The exhibition juror Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum, NYC, selected Poposki's work from among many entrants worldwide.

The work will be shown in a group show in the Viridian Artists gallery in Chelsea, New York, from July 2 - July 20, 2013, with a reception on  Thursday, July 18, 6-8PM.
Photo courtesy: Marija Todorova
Poposki's project "Hong Kong Atlas" starts off with Kai-cheung Dung’s novel "Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City", a book of (postmodern) fiction about Hong Kong, then traces the locations in that book onto the real terrain of today's Hong Kong by means of a psychogeography documented in digital photographs, and is then once again transcoded into visual form as a print combining archival pigment print on canvas and screen-printed acrylic paint. This is a project about positionality, a sense of place, about cultural translation and transcoding, and about mediating between different cultural flows.

Elisabeth Sussman is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, along with co-curator Jay Sanders, she curated the 2012 Whitney Biennial.  Prior to that, her exhibition Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective (co-curated by Lynn Zelevansky) completed its three-venue tour. Diver was awarded the AICA award for best monographic show in New York (2011).  Previously, her exhibition William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 (co-curated by Thomas Weski) was on a four-venue international tour. In 2007, Sussman’s Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” was awarded the AICA award for best monographic show in New York. She has organized a number of other Whitney exhibitions, including Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing (2005); Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993); Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996), with David Armstrong; Keith Haring (1997); and the Museum’s 1993 Biennial Exhibition. She has also co-curated two exhibitions on the work of Eva Hesse: one of Hesse’s drawings with The Drawing Center and another of her sculpture with The Jewish Museum, both in New York. Elisabeth Sussman was a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1999. She was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2003. She is the author of many publications, including Lisette Model (Phaidon, 2001). She has taught at M.I.T. and Tufts.

May 21, 2013

Southern Style

Zoran Poposki, HK210512-1406, archival pigment and silkscreen ink on bamboo paper,
21x60 cm, 2013-2014

April 14, 2013

Translation(s) in Hong Kong

Translation(s): international video project
Curated by Laurence Wood and Zoran Poposki
Venue: Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, Shatin, Hong Kong.
April 20th- May19th 2013

Contemporary lives have become journeys in a chaotic universe, transforming it into a territory which may be travelled both in time and space, as Nicolas Bourriaud states in the Altermodern Manifesto. In such a changing terrain, individuals’ daily practices, as well as their sense of self, rely on constant translation and mediation between identities and cultures, an ongoing process of negotiation of cultural meanings. The artists invited to take part in this exhibition consider this centerless chronotope of global negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures as an emerging network of new pathways of translation between multiple formats of expression and communication. Through a variety of approaches to video, they explore the dynamic interplay between the global and the local on a concrete, material level.

Videos will be screened on the giant video billboard in the Hong Kong Science Park, where paintings by Laurence Wood and Zoran Poposki will also be on display.


This collaborative project is funded by the Hong Kong Institute of Education under a Knowledge Transfer initiative with support from the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. The videos will also be screened in the ArtsBus on Hollywood Road as part of Hong Kong ArtWalk Extra on the evening of 18th April 2013. 


Zoran Poposki will present the video "Hong Kong Atlas" (with original music by Herzel), and mixed media paintings from the eponymous series of urban landscapes as a form of translation or transcoding of Kai-cheung Dung's novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City.

April 04, 2013

Cities of memory



PERFORMING AND MEDIA ARTS IN THE POST-CONFLICT CITY
4-5 APRIL, 2013 AT QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST

Developing from the work of the Belfast-Sarajevo Initiative (2007-2010), the School of Creative Arts at Queen’s, in association with the British Academy, is hosting this conference to examine how theatre, performance, film, and the visual arts address post-conflict situations, and intends to encourage interdisciplinary discussion on the contemporary arts and their relation to issues of testimony, witnessing, forgetting, representation, healing, reconciliation, agency, and metaphor.

The Cities of Memory research project aims to develop methods and resources for studying the role of the performing and media arts in post-conflict cities, and regions. Building on the work of the Belfast-Sarajevo Initiative (2007-2010), a forum that facilitated dialogue between artists and practitioners from both cities through a series of collaborative workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and performances, Cities of Memory has been awarded British Academy funding to situate this praxis in a comparative critical framework through the organization of an international conference, the production of an edited book, and the development of the project website.

The website has been created to publicize the work of the project, and provide a resource for scholars and practitioners working in the areas of contemporary Irish, Bosnian, and European theatre, film and visual arts to compare how these art forms engage with questions of memory and testimony, and the politics of reconciliation and conflict transformation.

Artist and researcher Zoran Poposki is presenting a paper together with Marija Todorova on Resisting Narratives of Ethnicity and Disintegration through Civic Art.

March 26, 2013

Symposium: The event in artistic and political practice


Symposium
Event in Artistic and Political Practices
Amsterdam 26-28 March 2013

In contemporary artistic, media and philosophical discourses the notion of the 'event' has gained considerable currency. Since the 1990s the event has been central to a range of performative, media-based, socially and politically engaged artists' work, as well as in artists' involvement in/with non-artistic projects and practices ranging from political protest to scientific research. The growth of interest towards the potentials of art openly working with reception and/or participation as its methods has also lead to institutional commissions of this type of artistic work. For the institutions event-based art has triggered entirely new questions about the documentation and preservation of artistic practices.

While the concept of the 'event' has been extensively elaborated upon in some fields – for instance, in theatre studies, urban studies and especially in philosophy, in recent art history and cultural theory, there are still few attempts of theorization.
This conference sets out to articulate the meaning of the 'event' in relation to artistic, media-based and performative cultural practices. We invite presentations articulating the range of performative, conceptual, media-based, game-based, relational, participatory and other practices that can be approached as events. Elaborations on the methodological issues of studying events are also welcomed.

Keynote speakers

Alain Badiou is René Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS in Switzerland, formerly Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure Paris. 
Oliver Marchart is Professor of Sociology at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. 
Claire Fontaine is a collective artist based in Paris. 
János Sugár is an artist and theorist of public art and media based in Budapest. 

Symposium 27-28th March 

Universiteitstheater, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16-18, 1012 CP, Amsterdam 

Conference partners sponsors:
Lectoraat Art and Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academy (LAPS)
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam http://asca.uva.nl/ 
Mondriaan Fund
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)
Master Artistic Research The Hague
Institut Français des Pays-Bas, Maison Descartes
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA)

Conference organisers: 
Margaret Tali, Thijs Witty, and Eva Fotiadi.

March 07, 2013

Public Art in the Balkans


International conference ‘Public Art in the Balkans, 19th-21st centuries: intentions, interpretations, controversy‘  
March 14-15, 2013, American Research Center in Sofia (Bulgaria)
Public Art expresses the deeds, accomplishments, sorrows, identity, and values of leaders, cities, nations and empires. Displays of Public art in the Balkans were introduced by the Romans and their Byzantine, Medieval, Ottoman heirs continued to embellish cities and countryside alike with the "art of empires". In the 19th and 20th centuries, Public Art reflects nation-building, political alliances and ideology, while art installed after 1989 ranges from explicitly anti-Socialist sentiment to experiments in an uncertain world. Public art in the Balkans does not go unnoticed and is frequently the subject of controversy.
Papers presented in the ARCS/IBS conference will address many aspects of this broad subject: Original context and meaning – agents, historical background, setting, style and iconography; Regional comparison (from city to city, province to province, country to country); Links between exemplars of Public Art from different periods; Role and re-interpretation of Public Art in later periods.
Zoran Poposki presents his research in a paper entitled "Spectacular power and identity: contemporary public art in Macedonia", co-authored with the archaeologist Vasilka Dimitrovska.