Art Organization - case Zagreb & Labin, February/March 2019.

Art Organization - case Zagreb & Labin, February / March 2019.

As part of a long-term international research project that analyzes artistic (self) organization and relations within art groups in the post-Yugoslav region, during February 2019, kuda.org visited Zagreb and Labin. We spoke with members of the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom (WHW) Ivet Ćurlin and Ana Dević www.whw.hr and with Dean Zahtil in front of Labin Art Express (LAE) www.lae.hr.

The research within the Art Organization project is focused on group and collective processes, within the relationship between artists and other participants in them. At the same time, through the phenomena of self-organization, the project examines the role of civil society organizations as progressive places for dealing with art, through discussions with the protagonists of these practices from the 1990s to today, with reference to experiences and heritage 60s and 70s and Belgrade Surrealism of the 30s of the last century.

The visit and talks were focused on the protagonists who developed their practices in the period after 1991.

Ana and Ivet (WHW) pointed out some important attributes of the work of the association that works in the field of visual culture and curated exhibitions of contemporary art practice: '... each [our] new concept is a new work process, even although we are now well-established team, there are a lot of different situations, and it transforms, [the process] changes ... we negotiate a lot about it, we think, we try to find common solutions, we work on the content together ... '

Another example is the specific focus on the organization Labin Art Express (LAE), which is articulated and symbolically determined through the spatial infrastructure of the former mine in Labin, and which throughout its history has undergone a number of transformations in its programming practice, but with a clear attitude: '.. .when they ask - are you socially engaged? what is that question !? well, art that is not socially engaged today is not art! ... 'Dean Zahtila.

 

The introduction to the research of group work, joint authorship, working conditions, was conducted during 2017 through interviewing participants and protagonists of the contemporary art scene from Yugoslavia.

The Art Organization is part of a wider project Vectors of Collective Imagination in which kuda.org collaborates with partners: Multimedia Institute mi2 and Kulturtreger-Booksa, Zagreb (HR); Glänta, Gothenburg (SE); Counterpoint, Skopje (MK) and Berliner Gazette, Berlin (DE).

The project is co-financed by the European Union's Creative Europe program, the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, and the City Administration for Culture of the City of Novi Sad, with the structural support of the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.