Catalogue Police the police

FOREWORD
ROMELO PERVOLOVICI - DIRECTOR OF THE BIENNIAL OF YOUNG ARTISTS
The 4th edition of the Biennial of Young Artists is meant to be a deviation from the idea of surveillance in its proper sense, as
a process of monitoring and supervising behaviors of individuals and communities. “Watching over” stands not only for visual
observance, but also for all forms of monitoring from a high authoritarian position.
Capturing personal experience, as opposed to surveillance, the artists’ eye investigates and creates a subjective archive of
images featuring militia, policemen, guardsmen in various situations.
While policemen have a surveillance mission, the artists have the policemen under sousveillance. This “art-in-action” can
be embodied as a social comment, breaching the privacy of authority. Such an insight is often seen as a threat to society.
This exhibition can be perceived as a series of visual comments without subversive content, implying that “we don’t live in
completely different worlds”.
In Eastern European countries, surveillance used to be a routine “undertaken in order to assure compliance, as a means
of repression, collecting information and inoculating fear. Communist states relied on surveillance in order to survive. This
inevitably left an important and uncomfortable legacy to state traditions. The state apparatus is still ready for coercion, although
many communist states no longer have the resources for an efficient repression.” (J. Grugel)
Lyotard saw the population of communist countries as being at the same time the authors, the recipients and the subjects of
a unique narration, from which they were not allowed to recede, being under permanent surveillance. From this perspective,
totalitarianism was the end of modernity and a deliberate attempt to neutralize any type of subjectivity.
The Biennial of Young Artists, which can also be called the Biennial of Young Art, deals with the following aspects: the
subjectivity that left modernity behind and the creative sousveillance which forms a coherent community for monitoring the
system of surveillance.
5