collection-artist

As the main narrator, the artist briefly introduces us to the story of the Geozavod Building at the beginning, and then places the emphasis on two writers who worked outside the official elite social streams, which is why they remained anonymous, i.e., forgotten. One is Radomir Prodanović, who could have become an avant-garde poet and writer, and the other is R. Lenić, who wrote so-called entertaining literature in the 1930s. They are presented through excerpts from their oeuvre – Prodanović with his avant-garde epic poem Let Us Sing, and Lenić with an excerpt from her novel Gordana’s Love. Prodanović and Lenić wrote on different topics and in different styles. Zograf finds a connection between them in the fact that they both thought and wrote about basic human feelings and concepts such as love, hate, fear, hope. This is about the relationship between the vital force of creativity and the fact that it can be almost completely suppressed with the passage of time.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-180/14.6.2016.
Inventory No. 1418
Photo: Cultural Centre of Belgrade

Selected Bibliography:
53^rd October Salon, Good Life: Physical Narratives and Spatial Imaginations. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2012

In the Venus Series 2014–2016, Reinhardt posed with commercial aids that simulate femininity – prosthetic breasts, face masks and rich wigs – the products intended mainly for transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens. Inconsistent with my maybe normative understanding of such clothing practices, it is obvious in these photographs that the person wearing these clothing accessories is a woman, (although it is not clear whether this is the artist herself). Through the process of filming, Reinhardt moves these products – mainly intended for men who would like to look like women – aside, and reveals how she wants to be seen and how this can awaken and strengthen her desire. Taking on the role of characters such as a pole dancer, she appears either naked or with barely covered large silicone breasts and then, in an extremely surprising setting, spreads her legs to expose a prosthetic penis – or in her words “the best of both worlds”. The Venus Series is not so much a critique of the way in which gender is constructed and reproduced, but it is a matter of complicated ways in which our desire (auto)directs itself and finds the form of its expression.
From the text by Marianne Mulvey, catalogue of the 56^th October Salon

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-15/23.01.2018.
Inventory No. 109
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

The work is a result of an unusual collaboration or rather exchange between two artists, and therefore freed from the prescribed plans and expectations during the shooting. Marta Popivoda, the filmmaker “had received” the dance piece I Heart Lygia Clark by Jennifer Lacey, and immediately after, she shot the next performance in return. The dance piece itself addresses the idea of therapy as an artistic practice through a series of beauty treatments that the choreographer provides to each individual viewer. Raw material from this shooting is in possession of both authors and can end in very different films.

The video-work/installation Talk to Him by Marta Popivoda amplifies the multilayer performance, the performance for and with the spectator who doesn’t see it; the “backstage” performance between the three performers who – apart from executing the tasks that produce the sensorial event for the blind / dead spectator – perform their roles for one another; and the cinematic performance constructed by the camera eye. How to locate here the spectator’s eye, the point in which the set of actions, micro-events, and audio-visual sensations become performance? Is it about trust and confidence? In the search of the missing and shifting spectator’s eye, the film loses the sovereignty over its “object” and becomes a fragile affective experience, thus transmitting the sensuality of the performance to the film spectators.

Choreography: Jennifer Lacey, Audrey Gaisan, Barbara Manzetti
Performers: Nicolas Courtier, Jennifer Lacey, Audrey Gaisan, Barbara Manzetti
Copyright: Marta Popivoda

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5 -391/24.11.2016.
Inventory No. 1460
Photo: still from the video work

Educational Mural about Little-Known History of Painting by Darinka Pop Mitić is a reconstruction of her work presented at the jubilee 50^th October Salon in 2009. It is, in fact, a reconstruction of a reconstruction and a logical continuation of the earlier work of this artist who deals with the relationship between history and memory in our (ex-Yugoslav) art space. Based on an alternative history, the artist offers us a passage into another past. In its original form, the work consisted of a series of six murals, painted on the sixth floor of the garage in Masarikova Street, at the place where the first October Salon was held far back in 1960. These murals were (un)realized paintings by famous local artists with clear political connotations related to the time and place of their (alleged) existence.
Aleksandra Estela Bjelica Mladenović

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-296/1/29.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1366
Photo: Milan Kralj

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