Author: dado_admin

collaborative project / research art, 2017.

Supplementary/Extra Classes is conceived as a multi-layered and multifaceted project that, through its various forms, re-examines and treats the role of culture and art within contemporary production relationships. In formal terms, Supplemental/Extra Classes functions as an ad hoc institution that, with its program and policy, becomes the user of the infrastructure in which it operates by inserting additional content, reviewing the functioning models and modes of production of its host. By considering these aspects from the producers and recipients of culture, we strive to articulate the contemporary requirements of artistic production and the problems that arise in its realization.

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participatory installation, 2016.

Project How does cooperative work? is a participatory installation-experiment consisting of simulation of co-operative work and joint production. Project participants were invited to initiate production based on restoration of old furniture according to cooperative principles. This is an experiment whose aim is to overcome today mainly theoretical concepts of self-organization, self management, economic equality, and to make the collision of these political concepts with the materiality of the process of work. The project deals with the possibility of economic democracy in the system of dominant social, political and cultural production today.

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participatory project, Belgrade, 2014.

The idea of the project “Open School of Economics” is based on a research and practical work in the promotion of alternative economical models that go beyond the neo-liberal economic system. Field of interest is the study of economic theories that offer potential opportunities for the development and establishment of economic exchange that is not sustained by the principles of individual profit entities but is driven by the interest of the community as a whole.

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research based art, 2012.

Project Social economy – Case: Čačak is an experimental attempt to establish a commodity exchange model that could exist within current economic processes in our country that are ever so determined and guided by the principles of liberal economy. The project implied organizing an open workshop with initiative to contemplate on all potentialities, as well as making practical attempts to execute some real self-sustainable systems of exchange which wouldn’t be determined by predominant logic that production or labor always results (or should strive to that) in extra value, thus profit. In that sense, only premise of this project was led by reverse logic to the one that predominant political economy demands- circulating from extra value (profit) to product, trying to get it to be free (in this case the aimed product was food). In this example, we considered as extra value of all of those products which, for some reason, can’t find their place on the market, while different ways of their exchange mostly aren’t provided, or are even forbidden by law.

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Fathers and Forefathers, 2011-2014
Video transferred to DVD, text, color, no sound, 2’13”
Courtesy the artist

Fathers and the Forefathers is a video intervention based on the several days secret monitoring of the son of the famous Serbian politician Nenad Čanak done by artist personally. The video shows the child looking for Roman coins using a metal detector in the fields in Vojvodina (Province of Serbia) around Begeč (once a Roman city called Onagrinum). However, the only coins he finds are from the Yugoslav period.

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performans u javnom prostoru / video transferred on DVD, 8:34.

 

The project Wedding Pieces comprises series of actions which allude my arrival and the presence at the German weddings in a role of an uninvited guest/ insider. I conducted this intervention occasionally during several months, and I chose the weddings which were organised for the close family members and were always held in public. After approaching the celebrating group I was asked to leave or banished from all the weddings within a short period of time. Several times I managed to stay long enough to pose with the group in making the joint photo. My action was secretly recorded by a person whose function was to act as a paparazzo and whose task was to shoot the action in a form of video and photo documentation from a certain distance. The goal of the action was literal materialisation of exclusivistic logic on which dominant models of today’s togetherness are based – starting with the marriage, the concept of national country and EU.

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research art / intervention, 2008-2010.

One of the principle determinants of liberal capitalism which is based on the existence of private property, within countries in transition, reflects through a process of public property selling-out and its complete privatization. This principle of privatization has been proclaimed as one of the vital strategies of Serbia’s development and one of more important conditions of her path towards European Union.

On the other hand, questions regarding the problematic status of former Serbian province Kosovo1 have shown that proclaimed values are not a mechanism of country’s acting, wherefore the ‘public property’ (Kosovo) is still one of the priorities the country is fighting for.2 This struggle is/was conducted by cultural, political, legal and military interventions while the key, economic aspect, has remained cunningly camouflaged by cultural and nationalistic interests. Namely, the discourse that was and still is produced by Serbian official authority is heading towards global mythologisation (hegemonic culturalization) of Kosovo. This region is, therefore, in Serbia most frequently presented in the form of spirituality which is essential for ‘Serbian origin’, nonmaterial goods worth fighting for and the like. Those conceptions dominant in Serbian society are most frequently substantiated by the fact that some of the oldest orthodox monasteries are located exactly in that region, so in that way, via social ideology, religious aspiration towards spiritual, which is immanent to Serbian orthodox people, has gained socially-manifested and politically desirable material form – struggle for territory of Kosovo.

Likewise, spiritual values based on a construction of the term ‘Great Serbism’ have been founded on repeated actualization of the Kosovian battle – on which Serbian national myth regarding heroism, suffering (caused by Turks, non-Christians), self-sacrifice, betrayal, and heroic death of the last Holy Serbian ruler, King Lazar, has been raised. The values based on this myth and a construction of the term ‘ Great Serbism’ are precisely what nationalistic authorities used as the worst means of manipulation during the wars in 1990s, and which effect is even today widely present.

Project ‘Ransom’ alludes the act of purchasing of three works of art from Kosovian artists and presenting of the project as a work of art in Belgrade. This act exists as:

an act of concrete highlight to specific Kosovian ‘culture’ via determination of its material value. This aspect of the work of art aims to provoke dominant cultural paradigms of Kosovo in Serbia according to which a struggle for Kosovo has never been presented via question of power and money, but as a much ‘higher’ and transcendental question regarding the ‘ very being ‘ of Serbian people. Likewise, with this act the Kosovian culture (art) is not taken over and like that, conditionally said, by being disjointed (or dispossessed) is not presented in Serbia4 , but there are methods that are used to show utter respect for its importance and value;
an act of ‘disauthorization’ of specific Kosovian culture via its transformation into private property; and vice versa,
an act of authorization via precise determination of private property and its transformation into ‘general welfare’ (the work of art produced by open competition).
Namely, this project alludes an intervention inside the official institutions of Kosovo (Ministry of Culture) in order to authorize selected artists’ works of art as private property of those artists, so that they could be taken out of the country (across the border) in a legitimate way. This insufficiently transparent status of ownership between private property – public goods in Kosovo (but also in Serbia when it comes to Kosovo) opens a field for different social and state manipulations of (somebody else’s) property. On the other hand, by offering the work of art to Serbian funds (both state and private) for production, works of art of Kosovian artists become at the same time disauthorized, turn into public goods, which provokes brutal establishment of Serbian cultural hegemony in Kosovo.

Therewith, project Ransom, as a form of deconstruction of cultural and material practices that are dominant in Serbia and Kosovo, has an aim to act as an emancipator’s social practice by witch property (culture) is determined as private and by doing so nationalistic mechanisms of both confronted sides (Serbia and Kosovo) are equally provoked.

Production: Stacion, Centre for Contemporary Art, Prishtine, Interkulturalni dijalog, Rex-B92/Ministry of Culture, Belgrade, Mangelos, Young Visual Artist Award, Gallery Kontext, Belgrade

Author: Danilo Prnjat

Collaborators: Artan Balaj, Fatmir Mustafa-Carlo

public intervention-media project (censured project), 2007.

The project Harmonija is more complexed contextual project carried out in Novi Sad2, the city which was during the realisation of the project under the management of the extreme nationalistic party – Serbian Radical Party and was at the time its most powerful center. On the other side, the government the Republic of Serbia was formed by pro-european political options with the Democratic Party at the head.

My project alluded scheduling of an independent exhibition at Art Gallery of the Cultural Center Novi Sad whose programme is entirely financed by the city of Novi Sad, and whose cultural politics is herewith determined. The concept proposed to curators of the Centre was naive and seemingly non-political. The suggestion alluded three barely dressed stripers who would be standing still in the gallery, and who were supposed to be exposed to the eyes of artistic audience through the windows of the gallery. After that I spent all the means I had on powerful PR campaign, strong advertisement (posters, notifications) and the like. Then, two days before the opening of the exhibition I told the curator of the gallery about ‘ the sudden change of the concept’ – where the strippers wouldn’t be standing still, but they would be naked and wave to the audience and they would hide their faces with the Serbian flag. The usage of the national symbol (as it was evaluated, in a ‘negative context’) momentarily resulted with the decision of the Centre’s director to ban the performance. I took advantage of the opening of the exhibition, the arrival of media and audience to act protest and give numerous interviews, and I put posters written with the words CENSURED all over the gallery. In the following few days, cultural columns of all the written media in the country polemised the scandal. Media prone to the democratic political currencies used the case as a motive for criticising the Radical Party’s cultural politics, where members of pro-nationalistic currents criticised the artist (me), declaring the one (me) as ‘ corrupted’, ‘over politicised’ and the like.

This project provoked a public discussion with the participation of some of the most prominent political representatives of both of the leading political options in the country where all the parties were forced to state in public their expectations regarding culture and art so that by the very fact they were involved in realisation of the art project they were forced to make mechanisms which they used to shape and control the culture of the country become transparent. On the other hand, the project suggests an idea of impossibility of a true social change today without strong local, political, media and ideological support in general, hence it points to border determinations, paradoxes and (im)possibility of art’s (politics) and artist’s acting in our society.

 

Intervention in public space (Belgrade, 2007.), video transferred on DVD, 7:18″

Dominant principles of establishment, when it comes to public space in our environment, represent the space mostly scheduled for specific gender only. Starting with separated public toilet premises to betting places, large beauty shops and saloons…

Entering post socialistic era and losing of formed national identity have brought comeback of traditional values of patriarchal system in which all relationships are placed in special hierarchy. That state is additionally enhanced by arrival of large corporate systems (capitalism) which logic of permanent market expansion erased this hierarchy to some extent but contributed its additional alienation.

Lilly Project represents an action in which at one point 200 man performed unannounced guerilla invasion into the largest beauty shop in Belgrade- Lilly. This literal and not metaphoric performance of “patriarchal”, “male” behavior- which is based on assumption that He has the right to occupy any space or person by all means, with or without permission (standpoint that is mostly unique to individuals raised as man)- exists as an example of pure form of protest by which the distance that suspends normal, utilitarian and social process is marked. Continue reading Lilly

performance in public space, Moscow, 2006. / video transferred on DVD, 1:22″

Red Square in Moscow is an area which, in global perception, has always been connected to military parades, marches…a space where even today soldiers are spending several hours standing still in front of Lenin’s museum without showing any signs of tiredness.

Traditionally connected to typically official and military perception of a man… a strong, precise man in stiffed clothes with rigid attitude…even today he has remained a sort of a symbol of strongly defined, intangible and ‘ clearly determined’ idea of masculine that has been cherished for centuries by both, Balkan and Oriental tradition forcing appropriate “military look” in appearance as well as in behavior; while Russian climate, previously central place of communistic and post communistic regimes, today represents a central frontier of modern and traditional values.

In performance Red I spend one hour standing still in the middle of square dressed in white, lips stressed with red lipstick.

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