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НОћ НАм пРИјА …
thE Night PLEAsEs Us …
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JP/CP: The space between audience and artworks is part of
making the exhibition. The Swedish Embassy in Belgrade
has launched an educational program; an exchange project
between Serbia and Sweden around educational activities.
In collaboration with this project we will provide training
related to audience work.
We also like the immediacy of moving images. The
artists with whom we have the privilege to collaborate
instantly catch the visitor’s attention, and then go deeper.
This method returns in their presentation in the building.
The visual element is part of the exhibition’s wider sensual
appeal. For instance, Steve McQueen’s sound piece on
glossolalia, talking in tongues, adds another dimension
to his Once Upon A Time, with images that NASA sent out
in space to communicate with extra terrestrial life forms.
Meanwhile, Eva Koch’s works are permeated with sensory
information on different registers that are all central to the
understanding.
CB: Like an analogy, saying the same thing but not quite.
JP/CP: We have talked about this as articulations that offer
new ways of communication. Thus, Aernout Mik’s work
Scapegoats was developed in parallel with the war in Yugoslavia
in the 1990s. This is what poetry and drama are
about, crossing at a different level than everyday speech.
Particularly in the kind of complex relations that are
manifested in a civil war. Or in the case of Amar Kanwar
who followed the Balkan war very closely while he was
working with The Lightning Testimonies, a work describing
terrible events on the Indian subcontinent. Art can be a
way to see that we belong to a larger global context. It
is not a question of naming or defining, but of inventing
new names and different perspectives. To dislocate truths
and open possibilities of recognizing that there are several
ways of understanding. In a sense, this is what Tim Etchells
presents in his new work, Nightlanguage. This is a new
mode of communication, opaque and partly abstract, that
responds to the exhibition site.
CB: So curatorial work with the audience does not mean
that you fill the exhibition space with texts.
JP/CP: It is extremely important to leave space for interpretations,
a sort of in-between audience and artworks. This is
what we try to do: to reinvent language, maybe to dislocate
it from reality and develop it in dialogue with the present,
the here and now.
When inviting Ana Adamović, we talked about her
film Madeleine that takes its name from the memoryevoking
biscuit in Marcel Prousts’ famous novel. It uses
8-mm footage from her family archive—personal images
that are almost universal in their appeal. We always work
with artists who have a capacity for making art relevant
to everyday life, in both a subtle and a poetical-political
way. We want to make room for a poetical interpretation.
We sincerely believe that art can make a difference. Perhaps
not change the world, but contribute to changing us as
individuals.
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