collection-artist

The film was edited in 1973, when it was also shown in Student Cultural Centre; it was shown several more times during the 1970s, after which the author forgets about the film, the ways of art leading him elsewhere.
However, editor at the “Menjačnica (Exchange Office)” Gallery of the Goethe Institute started a programme of exhibitions in 2016 (which has continuously been going on to date, for full five years), with the idea of presenting the work of the artists who in any way collaborated with German artists or created work that in any way interacts with German arts and culture. I remembered then that I had at a certain point recorded a not inconsiderable series of black-and-white photos and colour slides, as well as the mentioned film. For this occasion, I accepted the job and digitally postproduced this film. I re-edited it, added several frame sequences, and recorded instrumentals for musical background, which was Richard Wagner’s. This digital version of the film was made in 2016 from the material recorded in 1973.
The premiere of the digital version of the film was in the Goethe Institute on 3 March 2016, as part of the exhibition Document as a Work of Art: Gestural Speech of Joseph Beuys, Film and Photography by Zoran Popović, 1973 (Edinburgh Art Festival). “Menjačnica” Gallery of the Goethe Institute in Belgrade.

Zoran Popović, artist

In the “Menjačnica” Gallery of the Goethe Institute, the artist exclusively presented the film and photographs made in 1973, when he recorded the twelve-hour lecture of the world-renowned German artist Joseph Beuys at Edinburgh Art Festival, where he himself had an exhibition. At Edinburgh Art Festival in 1973, in the Eight Yugoslav Artists exhibition organised in the Richard Demarco Gallery, Popović presented his graphics and slide projections of his two performances, previously put on in Belgrade (the Axioms performance, put on in the Student Cultural Centre gallery in September 1972, and the photo performance Hiding behind Sally Holman, made in Tašmajdan park in June 1973).
At the mentioned festival, as part of the Richard Demarco Gallery’s programme, which was presented on 19 August 1973 in the Melville College theatre, Marina Abramović, Gergelj Urkom, Raša Todosijević, and Zoran Popović each presented their performances on the same stage at the same time.
In the same location, on 20 August 1973, Popović used an 18mm camera to record Joseph Beuys’s performance: Twelve Hour Lecture: A Homage to Anacharsis Cloots (Anachrasis Cloots, Prussian nobleman, born in the vicinity of the German town Kleve, was an important figure in the French Revolution and a member of the French Parliament from 1792 to 1794). Popović’s fifteen-minute film focuses on the bodily and gestural speech of Joseph Beuys. Popović complemented the film with music, which additionally emphasises the aesthetic and reduces the pragmatic interest in Beuys’s action, and also establishes the difference between fomal transfer of contents and bodily shape of communication. Beuys’s lecture and Popović’s film are two extremes that operate effectively as a whole.
Apart from this film, the Goethe Institute Gallery also exhibited some 30 photos, colour and black-and-white, of smaller and larger formats, whose content corresponds to the film, while the photos are additionally interesting as a document because the faces in the audience are those of the Belgrade art scene of the time: Biljana Tomić’s, Raša Todosijević’s, Gera Urkom’s, Neša Paripović’s, Marina Abramović’s, Jasna Tijardović’s, Nuša’s and Srečo Dragan’s, Irina Subotić’s, Žika’s and Sanja Gligorijević’s, Tom Marioni’s (an artist, writer, and curator who founded the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco in 1970).
In addition to the obvious documentary quality, this work dedicated to Beuys also has a way of pointing out different affinities of Popović’s narratives, from the biographical to the analytical and theoretical ones, and indirectly relating the times, manners, influences, and exchanges within the art practice of the period.

Una Popović

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase agreement: III-5-300/22.10.2021.
Inventory No. 1708
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist

With this documentary series, the Playground production completes the story of a failed privatisation of two companies from Zrenjanin: using ŠINVOZ and BEKO as examples, it actualises the attitude of society as a whole towards the processes of economic transformation and opens a public dispute on the social consequences of this transformation.
Combining documentary recordings of labour strike, video archives, and statements from experts in different social studies such as economics (economists and economic media analysts) or workers’ rights (trade union representatives, legal experts, labour psychologists) as well as from the representatives of state bodies and institutions competent for the privatisation process, crime and corruption fight, social dialogue initiation – we try to reach the answer to the question: Why the position and rights of workers are seldom talked about?

Realisation and research team:
Dragan Gmizić, Dragan Kolarov, Csaba Polgár, Vuk Vukmirović, Saša Srećković
Director: Želimir Žilnik
Producer: Sarita Matijević
 

© Belgrade Cultural Centre, the October Salon Collection, and the artist
Purchase agreement: III-5-291/18.10.2021.
Inventory number: 1706
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist

Selected bibliography:
50^th October Salon, Circumstance. Belgrade Cultural Centre, 2009.

Around is a vocovisual work recorded as a video in 1984. Centro Videoarte from Ferrara had commissioned this work with the purpose of participating in the Immagine e suono Festival in Ferrara, in February 1984.
The whole work “revolves” around the English word around. The number of segments of the work corresponds to the number of letters/sounds of the word. Each segment deals vocally and visually with each letter and sound of the word. For the purpose of creating the work, the artist manufactured all the props from cardboard and personally performed all the movements and sounds that were planned. Each segment brings a variation to the interpretations of the letter that is “revolving.” The last letter, “d,” is placed in front of a mirror, whereby the letter “g” is formed above “d,” which the voice actualises as “god.” Vladan Radovanović had suggested the vocovisual as a multi-media genre of art, which in addition to the sound, visual, and spatial elements can also include the kinetic and tactile, always with the corresponding meaning. The work encompasses all the sound and visual phenomena, movements, and poetics, from glossolalia and rhopalic verse, through carmina figurate, to concrete, kinetic, visual, and sound “poetry.”

© Belgrade Cultural Centre, the October Salon Collection, and the artist
Purchase agreement: III-5-299/22.10.2021.
Inventory number: 1709
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist

The central place of the installation is occupied by Virgin Mary – Madonna, an authentic Catholic statue of the Virgin. The very year in which the sculpture was made, 1941, corresponds to the beginning of People’s Liberation War and the socialist Revolution as an attempt at establishing a new ideology whose leading symbol was a five-pointed star. A large number of five-pointed stars is lined in preserve jars. In these jars, they look agreeable, edible, benign. The way in which the new regime, under this symbol and following the victorious Revolution, imposed the new ideology was certainly not sweet, edible, and agreeable. Reshaping the man alone, the believer, an individual person, was not enough; the stamp of the new authorities also had to be imprinted on one of the basic symbols of religion – Virgin Mary. Hence her head is surrounded by a five-pointed-star-shaped halo.

The misfortune of this part of the world is that exclusivity is part of every system. Perhaps the time has come to stand up in defence of the five-pointed star.

Dragan Srdić

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-282/08.10.2021.
Inventory No.
Photograph:

Gradually creating a high emotional charge, the work reconsiders the position and ethics of artist in today’s society, but also the position of man in general in relation to the infrastructure thus created.

As the basis of the structure, the video uses found footage, public domain, audio generators, polygraph interrogation methods and similar artificial elements. The combination of these elements creates an atmosphere of deep isolation and discomfort, with the aim to ask questions about the hypocrisy, narcissism and a lack of emotion in the world (of art), defined by competitiveness and by capitalism.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-455/14.11.2018.
Inventory No. 1623
Photo: still from the video work

The work Without a Proposition for a Concrete Solution, structured as a spatial installation and video, considers the concepts of friendship and solidarity in three chapters. I am taking the context of the Non-Aligned Movement and the complex political landscapes of the second half of the 20^th century as a historical prism that refracts these topics. The starting point of the entire work is a hand-painted postcard from my private archive, dating back to the 1970s, written in broken Serbo-Croatian. The postcard was sent to my father as a gesture of friendship by an Egyptian friend/colleague. In the first chapter, the object and its written message bring us back to the time of non-aligned politics and the relations that the movement promoted and created. The concept of the world as an image of the political map, often found in the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement, is being established and deconstructed before the viewer throughout the work. The second chapter consists of conversation notes with a woman friend. Running through the content of the conversation – that is not heard but is present in the form of telops that enter the film’s structure – are toponyms such as Amsterdam and Sweden, topics of classes and immigration, as well as the organization of life in the capitalist system. This conversation, located in an apartment somewhere in Western Europe, reconstructs the potentials of freedom in the past, at the same time predicting a society that balances on the thin line between communion and situations of control and micro-violence.

The last chapter of the video is a metaphorical and alienated image of the mechanism of mass production of images, representing conflicts and pressures as social matrices in whose cracks we must find the space for encounter.

The spatial installation shapes the way we observe the film and other elements in the space. It is an inharmonious ambience of questionable functionality – it is a simulation of a museum and a fictionalized historical cabinet at the same time. It is a space in which the ideas and narratives of the work are unstable; they are floating, open for interpretation, looking for fragile connections and relations that open up a space for sharing of time, knowledge and emotions.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-472/16.12.2019.
Inventory No. 1668
Photo: still from the video work, installation view 56^th October Salon, Boris Burić

Every day, more than a thousand people try to survive by working as salesmen at the Bangladesh Bazaar in Yerevan, where they do not earn more than 100 to 250 Euro a month. In the video, they talk about how they survived the crisis in the post-socialist state, which closed most Soviet-era factories and destroyed social safety nets. Former factory workers describe the changes in living conditions that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, talk about their hopes and expectations for social change. While they live in misery, a small but very influential class of corrupt politicians and extremely wealthy oligarchs is teaming up with international corporations to further enrich themselves with profits from the transfer of state property and mining licenses.

A former mathematics professor Levon Yeremyan, who now works at Bangladesh Bazaar, notes, “95 per cent of people work and get the minimum wage, which is ridiculously low by European standards, and 5 per cent live like Arab sheikhs. Most people would definitely agree with his description of the wide gap between the impoverished masses and the oligarchs in Armenia. This deep divide contradicts the official flattering data.

Concept, camera, sound recording, video editing and production: Oliver Ressler
Interviews, translation and editing assistance: Arpineh Galfayan
Audio mix and colour correction: Rudi Gottsberger
Research on factories: Nora Galfayan, Vahe Budumyan
The project was done during a residency in Yerevan in the framework of the project “Eat and Work”, directed by Anna Barseghian, supported by Utopiana and BM:UKK

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-82/3.3.2020.
Inventory No.
Photo: still from the video work

Selected Bibliography:
Oliver Ressler: Cartographies of Protest, Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, Marius Babias, Emanuele Guidi, Stella Rollig (Eds.), Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna, 2014
http://www.ressler.at/socialism_failed/