EXHIBITION ART ORGANIZATION, SULUV Gallery 20-24. july 2020.
EXHIBITION ART ORGANIZATION, kuda.org&collaborators, JULY 2020.
SULUV Gallery 20-24. july 2020.
Bulevar Mihajla Pupina 9, Novi Sad
The Art organization is a long-term international research project implemented by the kuda.org research team with theorists and art historians Milica Pekić, Stevan Vuković, Ana Vilenica, Darija Medić and Ana Peraica.
Art Organisation analyses the phenomenon of artistic (self)organisation and relations within artistic groups and collectives in the post-Yugoslav region during the last fifty years, and the ways it influenced the profile and quality of their artistic production. Research within the project Art Organisation is aimed at group and collective processes of creation and internal dynamics between artists and other participants in them. The focus is on self-organised initiatives outside the framework of official institutions. Through the phenomena of self-organisation, the project questions the role of civil society organisations as potential progressive places in society through dealing with art. The project covers a wide historical field through discussions with the protagonists of these practices from the 1990s until today, with a review of the experiences and heritage of organising and collective creation in the recent past of local and national culture, through the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s and the Belgrade Surrealism of the 1930s.
During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the contemporary art scene in Yugoslavia. This work continues in 2018 and 2019, when interviewees were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who had realised their practice through group art work. The result of this research is an archive consisting of interviews, documentation of works of art and critical texts written during the project. In this sense, this research examines the ways in which practices have developed in the past in order to build on them, to integrate them into the framework of knowledge and skills with which artists today embark on self-organised projects, and to declare them a practical legacy that could be of great importance for the education of today's actors in the process of self-organisation in art.
During July 2020, a series of online conversations Vectors of Collective Imagination in Art will take place and simultaneously collaborative research working groups trough the program Fragments for studies on art organisations will meet online to analyse and review the materials created during the project. This working group will create a space for collective critical rewriting of the art history of the (post)Yugoslav cultural space and critical work with the generated archive. The online format of the upcoming events and sessions was selected due to the changed circumstances that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic and represents a kind of a challenge for all those involved in this process.
Art Organisation is part of a wider project Vectors of Collective Imagination where kuda.org cooperates with partners: Multimedia Institute mi2 and Kulturtreger-Books, Zagreb (HR); Glänta Gothenburg (SE); Kontrapunkt, Skopje (MK) and Berliner Gazette, Berlin (DE).
The project was supported by the European Commission through the Creative Europe program and the FFAIART Foundation for Art Initiatives and local program support of the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia and the City of Novi Sad.