RSSTrue Art / Truely Merchandise
X-OP conference
Berlin, 26th – 29th of January 2009
Croatian partner
Andreja Kuluncic´s work „image of the ‘other’ by andreja kuluncic“ representing by Jerica Ziherl and Djanino Bozic
The new project by Andreja Kuluncic is the result of a year-long research on the topic of social distance, with a focus on the formats of occurrence and construction of the image of the ‘others’, i.e. marginal social groups, in the local mass media.
The initial part of this complex project involved several stages: research, sociological survey, discussions and collaborations with experts in social and humanistic sciences. Now, at its final stage, the project continues with a set of direct actions that further explore ways in which it is possible to raise the sense of responsibility of the media as well as reshape the perception of both those who produce and those who read, watch or listen the media-generated content.
The artist’s tactic is thus based on subtle infiltration into dominant and discriminating models of constructing the image of the ‘other’. This is achieved (in close collaboration with journalists from the mainstream media) by a series of subtle insertion of positive, ‘normalizing’ news as well as with the individuals, organizations and initiatives belonging to the marginal groups in Croatian society. This collaboration formulates a crucial part of the project as the various media representatives, through the project, engage in exploring and initiating possibilities of an alternative, non-discriminating approach and discourses.
Looking into the models in which those – who are in the local context perceived as Others (whether this is defined through their sexual orientation, race or religion).
The lecture was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Muzeum Lapidarij
Andreja Kulunčić
Andreja Kulunčić never begins an artwork for no apparent reason. It may seem rather arbitrary or redundant to write something like that at the beginning of a text written to present and, as far as possible, summarize several years of intense work done by this artist, as well as her active presence on the Croatian and international art scene. However, the purpose of this statement is to indicate the radical shift that Andreja Kulunčić has taken in her artistic practice with respect to the conventional modernist paradigms of artistic subject, which one may succinctly express, among other things, with the famous saying: “No day without a line”, whereby brushstrokes would manifest a more or less successful association with a sort of supernatural inspiration that guarantees artistic quality and artistic genius. According to that point of view, it is rather irrelevant what time or space that artistic activity is taking place in – as a matter of fact, it can take place anywhere, since the supernatural inspiration, thus understood, cannot be circumscribed by the earthly coordinates of time and place.
For Andreja Kulunčić, it is precisely the time and place, the “here and now” of a specific social moment, that are the crucial factors of – and eventually also the primary reasons for – her artistic activity. Ever since 2000, when she realized her project called Nama, her work has been linked to relevant social and political issues, which she most frequently articulated precisely in public spaces – including not only urban spaces, but also the mainstream media. In order to understand the way in which Kulunčić approaches this public space – how the topics that she seeks to make visible are becoming a part of urban and media space (otherwise saturated by commercial and spectacular attractions) – it is necessary to define one of the basic strategies that she has been using in such projects: that of mimicry. The form of her artworks, placed in public places, is often mimicking the existing forms of public communication: newspaper ads, advertising billboards, city-lights posters, news articles, radio documentaries, etc. These forms serve to “sneak” closer to the targeted recipient of her message – the passer-by and consumer of the media, used to the informing and advertising strategies that are commonly employed in conveying the message.
However, what makes Kulunčić’s work a mimicry – a skilful, subversive exploitation of conventional forms – is the fact that the message she is making visible is exactly the opposite of the usual mass-messages sent off by commercials and by the media. It is an inversion of content that “awakens” the observer or even shocks him, throwing him out of his slumbering “state of spam,” of being overwhelmed by consumerist urges and the prevailing political passivity. The Nama project (2000), for example, took place in the midst of a long strike of Nama’s employees because the insolvent department store was on the verge of being closed down. Whereas the media were constantly reporting on the dramatic situation of the employees, Kulunčić made an inversion and even ironized the situation. She conceived of an advertising campaign for Nama, in which disadvantaged female workers of the rundown company were posing like models, their photographs flooding Zagreb in the form of city-lights posters. The characteristic feature of Kulunčić’s work is that she transposes the underprivileged subjects, as well as the social problem as such, from their inferior position into a temporarily superior one. Instead of pity, which is what the media were offering at best, she turned the employees of Nama into the empowered protagonists of action, while the key message was no longer the ruin of Nama or the individual tragedies of its miserable workers (with whom one could sympathize or not), but rather the ruin of Nama as a collective tragedy of the society.
Art projects by Andreja Kulunčić never contain an explicit narrative of an individual’s destiny; instead, the particular (a name, a person, etc.) emerges as an image of the general, or rather, the particular simultaneously presents a picture of the broader social problem. It is precisely with that ‘a-personal’ approach, by avoiding individual destinies, that the artist has managed to evade all pathos or further exoticization of the ‘other’. The point is to raise the awareness of the fact that an individual problem can also be social and that, by taking another turn, it can become individual again, since a social problem necessarily affects each of its members. In Austrians Only (2005), the artist designed and published appealing advertisements in colour in an Austrian newspaper, in which she was offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to Austrian citizens only: an “excellent” job of a cleaning man/woman, with a minimum salary and with no social rights. By this mimicking gesture, she turned the problem of illegal immigrants in Austria – which had already become a question of the collective subconscious in that country, including the suppressed hypocrisy of ‘legal’ Austrian citizens – into a problem of “genuine” Austrians, since she brought them into a situation where they were forced to imagine themselves in an embarrassing and deprived position of illegal immigrants.
Kulunčić’s most recent project On the State of the Nation (2008) likewise includes interventions in the mainstream media. The artist has been publishing a sort of virus-news in the Croatian media, in cooperation with journalists and members of social minorities, which force the dominant white, male, Catholic-Croatian citizen, precisely while he is reading his favourite sports news, to remember uneasily the existence of the Others: homosexuals, Chinese, or Roma, who likewise constitute the Croatian society and who share one and the same social and living space. Thus, the project has formulated a new model of promoting tolerance and more generally – a possibility of deconstructing the ‘otherness’ in the Croatian society.
Beside in Austrians Only, Andreja Kulunčić dealt with the issue of illegal immigrants in a project entitled 1CHF=1VOICE (2007/2008), which turned that invisible segment of Swiss society into the sponsors of Swiss government in a campaign that invited illegal immigrants to make donations for the reconstruction of the Swiss parliament. Kulunčić has called it a ‘political/artistic’ intervention, since this time she quite literally gave a voice to those who did not have it, by which she did exactly the opposite of what so many participatory art projects do, namely isolate the Other by ‘helping’ him/her and thus reasserting his/her position of Otherness. Contrary to that, Andreja Kulunčić regularly succeeds in avoiding the position of the ‘helping hand’ and the trap of patronizing – since by the afore-mentioned inversion she turns expectations into wonder, attracts attention, and dislocates the observer’s position into that of a reflecting subject, excluded from everyday life.
Is the very fact that an art project is collaborative, participatory, and empowering enough to legitimate it as socially praiseworthy and in extension important for promoting pluralism of all sorts, genuine democracy, etc.? Does such an approach (ethically biased) make it more difficult to evaluate projects such as those by Andreja Kulunčić as art projects? In order to reflect properly on socially engaged artistic practices, one should also reflect on their limitations, contexts, responsibilities, or rather questions such as: whom does such a practice address, what is its social function? It seems, however, that in evaluating such practices, apart from considering strategies they use or their social efficiency, one should also keep in mind the very origin of the practice and its primary motivation. As British critic Claire Bishop has suggested, “the best socially collaborative art does not derive from the superegoic injunction to ‘love thy neighbour,’ but from the position of ‘do not give up on your desire’”. The first approach (”love thy neighbour”) presupposes a certain amount of sacrifice and actually derives from the politically correct position that takes for proper what is “proper” in the eyes of others, while the logic of the latter relies on taking responsibility for one’s own desire rather than acting on account of feeling guilty. Beside the fact that Andreja Kulunčić never embarks on a project for no apparent reason, as we have stated in the first sentence, she also never embarks on one without a strong feeling of responsibility, combined with an equal amount of artistic curiosity and flexibility that, in collaborative or other processes that her projects must go through each day, leaves enough space for surprises and unexpected outcomes. In all those situations, Andreja Kulunčić never gives up on her desire.
Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača
Zagreb, December 2008
for the catalogue “Andreja Kulunčić” printed in January 2009
published by Rigo Gallery, Novigrad, Croatia
WEB PROJECTS
Closed reality: embryo
Distributive justice
http://www.distributive-justice.com/
PROJECTS IN PUBLIC SPACE
NAMA
Austrians only
Woman.index
1 CHF=1 VOICE
Bosnians out!
State of the nation
PROJECTS IN DIFFERENT MEDIA
RECONSTRUCTION
Andreja Kuluncic
Visual artist. Born in 1968. Studied sculpture, graduating in 1992 from the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. From 1992 to 1994 studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Works and lives in Zagreb.
Collective exhibitions & festivals (selection):
2009, Museum of contemporary art, Zagreb. Exhibition “Collection in motion” from the permanent collection.
2009, Institute of Contemporary Art-Dunaujvaros, HU. Exhibition “Agents and Provocateurs” (the project was stopped by the local politicians).
2009, REX, Beograd. Exhibition “RECONSTRUCTIONS: private = public = private = public”.
2009, Exhibition “Weak Signals, Wild Cards”, deAppel Curatorial Programme, Nort-Amsterdam.
2009, Labin City Gallery, exhibition “Finalists” from the Filip Trade Collection of Croatian contemp. art.
2009, Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany. Exhibition “A pair of Left Shoes – Reality Check in East Europe”.
2009, Stiftelsen 3,14 Bergen, Norway. Ehxibition “Soft Manipulation”.
2009, 43rd Zagreb Salon /anti-design/permanent alternatives.
2008, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Exhibition “Soft Manipulation”, project “New prison”.
2008. Moderna galeria, Ljubljana, SLO. Exhib. “Museum in the street“”. Project “Bosnians out!”
2008, Exhib. “Comunication”, Galery Ružić, Slavonski Brod, HR.
2008, Donumenta2008 – Croatia, Regensburg, Germany.
2008, SPAPORT, Banja Luka, Bosna and Herzegovina.
2008, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, PL. Exhibition “Another city, another life”
2008, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, UK. Exhibition “Positive Critical Imagination”.
2008. Urban festival, Zagreb. Project „I’m sorry … I’m not sorry“
2008, On-line exhib. „Victims’ symptom“, LabforCulture, Amsterdam. Project „Bad News“.
2008, Exhib. of Baranja Art Colony, G. Waldinger, Osijek / GMK, ZG. Project „Reconstruction“
2008, Exhib. „Schengen women“, Moderna gallery hosted by SKUC, Ljubljana.
2007, Exhibition „Work to do!“ Shedhalle, Zurich, CH. Project „1CHF=1VOICE“
2007, Contemporary Croatian Art, National Academy of Art New Delhi, India.
2007, “Nature&society / Parallel Lines“, Muzej Rupe ,Dubrovnik
2007, Exhibition „World Factory“, Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, SF.
2007, Exhibition „Private dancers“, Gallery O3ONE, Belgrade.
2007, Exhibition „Woman in Crossroads of Ideologies“. HULU, Split, Croatia.
2006, “Eastern Neighbors“, Cultural center Babel, Utrecht.
2006, HTMlles: Export 2, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul.
2006, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria. Exhibition “Destroyed Worlds”.
2006, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden. Exhibition “Normalisation“.
2005, MMSU Rijeka, Croatia. Exhibition “1. Biennial of Quadrilateral”.
2005, P.S.1, New York, USA. Exhibition “Day labor”.
2005, Tirana Biennale 3, Tirana, Albania.
2005, Generali Foundation, Wien, Austria. Exhibition “How society and politics get in picture”.
2005, Festival of Region, Upper Austria. Project “Austrians only”.
2005, Exhibition “Just do it!“ Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz, Austria.
2005, Iaspis Galleriet, Stockholm, Sweden. Exhibition: “Nuisance or Necessity?”
2004, Exhibition «A New Past», Marronnier Art Centre, Seoul, South Korea
2004, Liverpool Biennial International04. Liverpool, England.
2004, Exhibition «exUFexTension», Zagreb, Croatia. Urban festival.
2004, Generali Foundation, Wien, Austria. Exhibition “Collected Views from West or East”.
2004, Exhibition “Passage d’Europe”, Saint-Etienne, France. Museum of Modern Art.
2004, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany. Thematical focus «Cyborg Bodies». Proj. “Cyborg shop”
2004, Exhibition “Re-Location”, Halle fur Kunst Luneburg, Germany.
2003, U3, 4th Triennial of Contemporary Slovene Art, Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia
2003, 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey.
2003, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Exhibition “The American Effect”.
2003, Ludwig Museum Budapest, exhibition “Moszkva ter Gravitacio”
2003, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, US. Online exhibition “Translocations”.
2003, 4th Austrian Triennial on Photography, Graz.
2002, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria. Exhibition “Plus Ultra”.
2002, Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany. Project “Distributive justice”
2002, Manifesta 4, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Frankfurt/Main. Proj. “Artist from…”
2002, Exhibition “The Misfits”, Expo Park Moskau/ Kunstraum Kreuberg Berlin.
2002, Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition “Here Tomorrow”. Zagreb, Croatia.
2002, BigTorino Biennial of Young Art, Torino, Italy.
2001, Artspace, exhibition “Model Citizen”. Sydney, Australia.
2001, Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition “To Tell a Story”. Zagreb, Croatia.
2001, Galeria Nationales des Artes, exhibition “Becoming”. Tirana, Albania.
2001, Exhibition “Zadar Live”. Zadar, Croatia. Proj. “City walks”
2001, WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse, exhibition “What, How & For Whom”. Vienna, Austria.
2001, Generali Foundation “Double Life” exhibition, Internet / CD-ROM part. Vienna, Austria.
2001, The Alternative Museum, New York. Winter 2001 web-based exhibition.
2001, VIDEOLISBOA, International video festival, web selection. Lisbon, Portugal.
2001, 10th Triennale-India. New Delhi, India.
2000, Gallery The Brewery Project, exhibition “Flip”. Los Angeles, USA.
2000, 5th International Festival of New Film, GrandPrix in new media category. Split, Croatia.
2000, Gallery SKUC, exhibition “A Small Country for a Big Vacation”, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
2000, FILE Electronic Language International Festival, invited work. São Paulo, Brazil.
2000, Exh. “What, How & For Whom”, ZG, Croatia. Proj. “NAMA:1908 employees, 15 dep. stores”
2000, EMAF, European Media Art Festival 2000. Osnabruck, Germany.
2000, Exhibition “Ambience 90″. Sarajevo, BiH & Rijeka, HR.
1999, Mediaterra’99 festival (5th place). Athens, Greece.
1999, VIPER, Internat. Film Video and Media Festival. Lucerne, CH. Proj. “Closed reality-embryo”
1999, Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and Mediterranean. Roma, Italy.
1998, Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition “Media – Scape 6″. Zagreb, Croatia.
1998, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, exhibition “Post68”. Vienna, Austria.
1998, Museum of Applied Art “Internet.galaxis’98″. Budapest, HU.
1997, Biennale of Young Artists, Moderna Galerija. Rijeka, Croatia.
Solo exhibitions (selection):
2008, Gallery Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb, Croatia.
2008. Gallery Rigo, Novigrad, HR.
2006, Gallery PROZORI, Zagreb.
2006, Gallery NOVA, Zagreb.
2005, Art in General, New York, USA.
2003, Extended Media Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia.
2003, Art Centre Silkeborg Bad, Denmark.
2002, Artspace Visual Art Centre. Sydney, Australia.
2001, Gallery Multimedia Cultural Center. Split, Croatia.
2000, Gallery Miroslav Kraljevic. Zagreb, Croatia.
1996, Intermedia Arts. Minneapolis, USA.
1996, Gallery SC. Zagreb, Croatia.
1994, Gallery Tam Tam. Budapest, Hungary.
1994, Gallery Darat Al Funun, Abdul H. Shoman Foundation. Amman, Jordan.
Grants/Workshops:
2005, Artist in Residency, Art in General, New York, USA.
2003, Artist in Residency, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, US & ArtsLink/CEC Int. Partners
2002, Artist in Residency, Artspace. Sydney, Australia.
2001, Workshop of the 10th Triennale-India. Jaipur, India.
1999, SEAFair’99 Workshop. Ohrid, Macedonia.
1998, Grant in C3 (Center for Culture & Communication). Budapest, Hungary.
1996, ArtsLink Soros CCA. Minneapolis, New York.
1994, Installations and performances. Lake of St Anna, Romania.
1993, Royal Academy of The Haag. The Haag, Holland.
Awards:
2001, Award on 10th Triennale-India. New Delhi, India.
2000, GrandPrix in new media category. 5th International Festival of New Film. Split, Croatia.
2000, Second award on the croatian net.art competition [mi2]. Zagreb, Croatia.
Co-founder of non governmental organization Multidisciplinary Authors Projects and Actions (MAPA) for art, science and technology which have been founded in June 2001 in Zagreb, Croatia.
Since 2009. works as assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, New media department.
Address: Bernarda Vukasa 47, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia
Mob.:+ 385 98 903 93 29
e-mail: andreja.kuluncic@zg.t-com.hr
web-site: http://www.andreja.org