Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić
Fragile presence
roto-print
30 cm x 40 cm
2016
March of Hope, Refugees, Liberation, Salvation, Strength, Hand, Megaphone, Tool
Fragile presence serie
acrylics on canvas
variable dimensions (8 psc)
2016–2018
The spatial installation Fragile Presence, produced for the needs of the 56th October Salon, included painted objects, wall drawing(s) and 16 graphic sheets printed in the newspaper style and circulation. In the acrylic on canvas technique, the artists presented the dominant motifs of the drawings on walls and objects that made the original installation of the work.
The work refers to the March of Hope, as migrants called their foot march from the train station in Budapest to the German border, escaping threatening detention in Hungarian camps in the late summer of 2015.
The drawings show the symbols, processes and actors of the foot march. The work focuses on the fragile presence of the bodies and moving of their collectivity. It articulates the moment in which the dynamics of human bodies disrupts the technocratic defence measures of the “fortress” of Europe and shows the instant when invisible people, escaping from unbearable conditions of life, become visible and vulnerable, exposed to the mechanisms of governance, their very existence left to the hatred or solidarity and love of others.
Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić often deal with marginal, oppressed and socially endangered structures of society, such as Roma, economic migrants and immigrants, precarious workers, as well as with various consequences of transition, privatization, international geopolitical interests, etc. Their works do not record the aesthetic-anthropological exoticism of the poverty of refugees, Roma, migrants, but deal with finding solutions for the abolition of exploitation, oppression and enslavement of man in capitalism, addressing the whole society.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artists
Gift Contract: III-5-85/16.11.2016 / Purchase Contract: III-5-394/6.11.2019
Inventory No. 105, 1664
Photo: Courtesy the artists
Selected Bibliography:
56th October Salon, The Pleasure of Love. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2016
Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić, ‟Fragile Presence, Time for Movement”, The Large Glass, Journal of Contemporary Art, Culture and Theory, No. 25 / 26, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, 2018
Rena Rädle, ‟Artistic Protest Practices in Serbia”, Art, Anti-Globalism and the Neo-Authoritarian Turn, FIELD Journal for socially-engaged art criticism, issue 12–13, 2019
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Rena Rädle (1970, Neumarkt, Germany) graduated from the Art University in Kassel in 2002. Vladan Jeremić (1975, Belgrade, Serbia) received his master’s degree from the University of Arts in Belgrade in 2004. Since 2002, Rädle and Jeremić have worked as an art couple. Their art practice comprises installations consisting of drawings, sculptures and multimedia works. In their collaborative practice they explore the overlapping spaces of art and the wider social context in Serbia and beyond. Their works are part of museum collections, including Van Abbemuseum, Ajndhoven, the Netherlands; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Museum Reina Sofa, Madrid, Spain; Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece. Based in Belgrade. More information at http://raedle-jeremic.net/
Aleksandar Jestrović Jamesdin
Holy Fathers
mixed media
320 cm x 300 cm
2002
Here’s the thing about the work Holy Fathers, I will now briefly tell you what I remember about making it. Let’s say that it was made under the influence of fresco painting and the idea that elongated figures symbolize spirituality. I achieved this by placing one figure on top of another. I placed the woman on the table, the old woman on the stairs or the young man who climbed on the old man’s head, and I supported them all with sticks, which are there so that they do not fall. In the compositions in churches, the Holy Fathers are all male; here, it is half-and-half.
Aleksandar Jestrović Jamesdin
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-287/1/22.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1345
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Smuggle Trade
video, painting, drawing
variable dimensions
2009–2014
I don’t know any longer where to and how I’ve managed to drag all these works, for if it’s not Požega or Smederevo, you always need some kind of permit or other. And now that I live across the border, it’s even more of a hassle, I’ve been debating with these retards of ours on the border crossing whether it’s an oil on canvas or an acrylic painting, and whether it’s finished or just started; they are the very same Bosnian Comancheros from the Kelebija crossing who wanted to send me back to Bosnia on a truck in ‘95, for I was born in Zagreb. It was even worse with those Hungarian nationalists – I was only centimetres away from a rectal examination. I somehow managed to convince those idiots on the Croatian border that I’m one of them and that I have a studio in the Croatian Zagorje region, the stress of it all cost my curator, who was driving me then, a bout of diarrhoea. I guess I’d better not even mention those poor wretches on the Slovenian border, who are trying to practise Austro-Hungarian strictness… And when, after all that jerking off, you don’t even come to see the exhibition, well, I feel like committing suicide.
Aleksandar Jestrović Jamesdin
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-476/1/15.12.2014.
Inventory No. 1380
Photo: still from the video work, Milan Kralj, installation view 53rd October Salon, Ana Kostić
Japanese Plague
oil on canvas
110 cm x 86 cm
2008
The work is inspired by the fear of disease, which, along with the fear of war, is still widely present here, as in other Third World countries. I came to that conclusion when I talked to a friend who is my age and with the same education, who dropped art and is engaged in video production. He confided in me that he came up with the concept of the show in which he would deal with the most common health problems of our generation (early thirties), because in communication with friends he noticed that everyone has them, that is, that no one is healthy here.
Aleksandar Jestrović Jamesdin
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-37/5.12.2020.
Inventory No.
Photo: Milan Kralj
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aleksandar Jestrović or Jamesdin (1972, Zagreb, SFRY) graduated in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, under Professor Čedomir Vasić. He obtained a master’s degree at the Institute for Art in Context UDK Berlin, in the class of Assistant Professor Wolfgang Knapp. Since 1999, he has presented his works at 17 solo and over 100 group exhibitions in Serbia and abroad and won several significant awards. Served in the army, never convicted, married. Lives and works in Berlin and Belgrade. More information at: https://jamesdin.wordpress.com/
He participated in the 50th and 53rd October Salons and won the Cultural Centre of Belgrade Award at the 50th October Salon. The jury’s citation reads:
The jury’s decision is based on the desire to recognize the art practice that produces difference, and due to the fact that Jamesdin’s production “is created through a reflection of multiplied and unsystematized” personal and cultural references that surround him and that are an act of performativity, not a sublimated result.
Ana Hušman
Lunch
video, colour PAL, 4:3, 16mm/BETA
16’40”
Production: Studio Pangolin
2008
The video works Lunch and Football were screened at the 53rd October Salon, Good Life.
The rules of good manners found in books of etiquette – claim that they help people understand each other and facilitate their mutual communication, thus enabling us to engage socially with greater ease and self-confidence. We learn these rules from birth, which is the only way to completely internalize them. The film deals with customs of eating and drinking – specifically with the lunch situation, as eating together is the central place for showing others our refinement and civilized manners.
Be careful not to get into an awkward situation and lose the reputation of an honest and upright person due to a small intentional or unintentional breach, because you must not forget that, abroad, our people will often be judged based on your behaviour.
Grabovac-Knor, Bonton, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1972
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract III-5-16/23.01.2018.
Inventory No. 110
Photo: still from the video work
Football
video, colour PAL, 4:3, 16mm/BETA
15’
Production: Studio Pangolin
2011
Mexico City
2 teams
us and them
playing
51 min
1:0
Distributive attention has a handful of various forms in which it is shown during play. There is often a tendency for players not to be able to divert their attention from place they are looking at. Their attention is focused on only one object. The ability to change attention faster is a big weapon in game tactics. For the accuracy of the kick, the dimensions of the goal can be drawn on the wall and then divided into squares, and each square is marked with an ordinal number. On this wall, all kinds of kicks are practiced. The wall is very economical, because the player does not waste time while learning, which speeds up the automation of the striking technique.
Knežević, Priručnik za treniranje nogometa, Mala športska biblioteka, Zagreb, 1954
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract III-5-16/23.01.2018.
Inventory No. 111
Photo: still from the video work
О АУТОРКИ:
Ana Hušman (1977, Zagreb, Croatia) in her works disassembles the structures and textures of cinematic elements through various forms of film, installation, books, recording of image, sound and text. She experiments with the possibilities of animation, documentary and fictional elements of film, with voice and articulation. Her working process questions and plays with the positions of the amateur and professional subject of performativity, the medium itself, and the structures that dictate and produce patterns of behaviour. She is an associate professor at the Department of Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and a co-founder of the association RESTART, where she has been holding film education programmes for children and adults for many years.
Her works have been awarded nationally and internationally and shown at festivals and exhibitions worldwide: 9th Gwangju Biennale; 53rd October Salon; Medienturm Gallery, Graz; On the Eastern Front, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; lucy bodig & ART ON STAGE, URA, Istanbul; Stuttgarter Filmwinter; International Film Festival Rotterdam; 25 fps, Zagreb; DOK, Leipzig, etc. More information about her works at www.anahusman.net
Endy Hupperich
34 Perspectives on Contemporaneity
oil on canvas
210 cm x 160 cm
2013
Flexi legs
oil on canvas
205 cm x 170 cm
2012
Endy Hupperich’s paintings 34 Perspectives on Contemporaneity and Flexi Legs (which, along with the paintings Food for Little and The World of Magic, were exhibited at the 54th October Salon) ironically reflect everyday life and digital social space, containing an uncontrolled flow of images and other visual content.
Hupperich’s paintings resemble diary notes in which he daily writes down, scribbles and crosses out events and observations from his life and his imagination, creating a specific visual handwriting and repertoire. What at first glance looks like pop art or a form of postmodern citation is more a painted theory of the medium – painting, as a symbolic and chaotic mirror of the world and space that the paintings encompass, whether physical or virtual.
His artistic approach starts from artificial realism and random abstraction, his works try to show the symbiosis existing between paintings and everyday visual contexts they face as they emerge.
By translating an image from the digital to the tactile analogue space of a framed canvas, Hupperich does not refer to the technical innovation brought by digital image production, but – on the contrary – insists on the logic of production of images as spaces that are being filled with meaning and, at the same time, manipulate meanings in a way that confronts the expectations and habits we have of painting as a historically grounded discipline.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-298/29.9.2014.
Inventory No. 049, 050
Photo: Milan Kralj, installation view 54th October Salon, Ana Kostić
Selected Bibliography:
54th October Salon, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2013
Endy Hupperich: Albumtotal 2004 – 2008, Ulenspiegel Druck GmbH, München, 2008
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Endy Hupperich (1967, Kaufbeuren, Germany) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Professor Helmut Sturm. He lives and works between Munich and Mexico City, where he worked as a visiting professor at the Mexico City Academy of Fine Arts. He has exhibited mainly in Germany and Mexico. Since 2008 he has been an assistant lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His paintings reflect the knowledge of the contemporary visual culture and ideology in an ironic way.
Vlatka Horvat
About Around
various materials and objects
variable dimensions
2012
Vlatka Horvat prepared four works/installations for the needs of the 53rd October Salon: Door to Door, Fenced off Area, About Around and In Holes
A floor-based installation includes several groups or arrangements of found objects, in which smaller and smaller objects are placed one inside the other. All the objects that are used are loops, circles or ovals – placed on the floor and one inside the other, getting smaller and smaller as we move towards the centre of the arrangement they are a part of. The loops are either intact circular objects, or improvised structures made by joining pieces of string, cable and lines of materials. The act of inserting hollow and circular objects into one another blurs the distinct boundaries between the objects, as well as between the objects and the space they occupy. Exploring the idea of encompassment and the impossible ambition of attempting to encompass and grasp the physical world, the work plays with the issue of the way in which barriers mark the space and complicate the clear distinction between the place where one thing ends and the place where another begins. When the inside of an object becomes the outside of another, the spatial order is disrupted, and the negative space of a ‘hole’ is activated and eliminated at the same time. The unexpected provisional constellations and encounters of objects and materials taken from a variety of different contexts bring about a range of new associations, constructing surprising relationships and turning spatial hierarchies upside down.
Vlatka Horvat
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-292/26.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1359
Photo: installation view 53rd October Salon, Ana Kostić
After Tito, Tito
10 photographs of Tito’s official portraits, taken at the Atomic War Shelter in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina
46 cm x 58 cm (10 psc)
edition: 2/5
2011–2013
In 2011, while working on a project in Tito’s bunker in Konjic, Vlatka photographed framed portraits of Tito, which were in the bunker, the same portraits she grew up with, as they hung on the walls of classrooms, offices, workplaces, train stations… She shot them through the glass of the frame, in the places where they still hung, finding angles at which the fluorescent lighting in the bunker was reflected in the glass in different ways. Thus, the light was interacting with the portrait itself – the face was melting, being disrupted, or simply hardly seen, which opened space for numerous associations formed as a result of the mentioned intervention. Depending on the angle of looking, the fluorescent light tubes sometimes appeared to be passing through Tito’s forehead, and emerging again from the back of his head. Or he would be so brightly lighted that it would produce the ‘sun-in-his-eyes’ effect, literally blinding him. In some other photographs, the light was passing across Tito’s neck, like a guillotine, separating his head from his torso and virtually decapitating him.
These real and found effects that she used (and that every visitor can experience on entering the bunker) interact with the viewer and add a dose of fiction into the portraits, giving them a new appearance and meaning. The light reflected in the glass of the portrait creates optical effects, obscuring, abstracting and compromising the image of Tito and his authoritative face, pointing to the fact that looking at any historical material would always be obstructed – by the present moment, the place where you are standing and from which you are looking. The title After Tito, Tito, taken from a slogan from the 1980’s in Yugoslavia, confronts the past with the present; confronts the historical Tito from the portraits with his contemporary mirror image, produced in the troubled space of waiting, contemplation and stasis of the Konjic bunker.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-292/1/ 26.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1359
Photo: Courtesy of the artist, Milan Kralj
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vlatka Horvat (1974, Čakovec, Croatia) works in various media – sculpture, performance, photography, video and works on paper. She has exhibited around the world, in different contexts and environments – museums, galleries, theatres, dance festivals, public spaces. She lives and works in London. A winner of the Rema Hort Mann Visual Arts Foundation Award (2011) More information at www.leavidakovic.com
Flaka Haliti
Me, You and Everyone We Know
video
variable dimensions
2010-2013
The work was exhibited as a video installation at the 54th October Salon in 2013.
It is a video animation that describes, through a mind map, the position of male and female artists in the history of art and within the system of power. The animated diagram is constantly moving, illustrating the difficulty of maintaining the position. The work was created as a result of the experience that the artist gained after performing another work titled My Balls, in 2008. In a ritual (guerrilla) gesture, the artist brought animal testicles to the “altar” of a gallery in her hometown – Pristina. Abstract, but at the same time concrete works seem fun at first, but they often point to issues of problems in the system of action, interpretation and various limitations. Haliti thinks about our existence in the midst of constructed inclusions and exclusions.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract:
Inventory No. 201
Photo: still from the video work
Selected Bibliography:
54th October Salon, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2013
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Flaka Haliti (1982, Priština, Kosovo) lives and works between Munich, Pristina and Vienna. Her work is conceptual, based on a combination of different media. Haliti graduated from the Academy of Arts of the University of Pristina in 2006 and continued her education at the Städelschule / Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Frankfurt. Her works have been presented at numerous solo and group exhibitions. She is the winner of the First Prize at Agriculture and Banking, organized by Städelschule and Rentenbank.
More information at www.lambdalambdalambda.org/?/artist/flaka_haliti/
Adrijana Gvоzdеnоvić
Thanks for Your Visit and See You Soon
book
2013
The work Thanks for Your Visit and See You Soon is a collection of fiscal receipts that the artist collected over a period of one year. The book, in the form of a diary or diary notes, consists of scanned sheets of bills on which the artist intervened by drawing. The work was exhibited at the 54th October Salon in 2013 (No One Belongs Here More Than You); in response to the given concept, the work deals with the result of and the relationship to contemporary capitalist conditions of everyday life.
The installation Thanks for Your Visit and See You Soon was originally composed of a book and drawings created by copying newspaper pages over a period of one year – during her master’s studies at Sint Lukas University in Brussels. One sheet in the book corresponds to one scanned drawing on one bill. All the bills that were used form a block in the black booklet, titled “308.55 Euros”, which is the amount of tax. The topics of Adrijana’s work are anecdotal and/or peripheral art, conventions of presentation, artistic motivation and responsibility in the general context of art, and wider – of socio-political relations.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-289/1/24.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1358
Photo: Milan Kralj
Selected Bibliography:
54th October Salon, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2013
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adrijana Gvozdenović (1986, Cetinje, Montenegro) completed her postgraduate studies in interdisciplinary graphics at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, and her master’s studies at Sint Lukas University in Brussels. Her work focuses on the production of art books through which she develops sort of time-based – site-specific – publications. She works as a researcher and associate at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. More information at https://gadi.me/
Ivan Grubanov
Dead Flags
mixed media on canvas
100 cm x 130 cm, diptych
2013
The Dead Flags Series shows the flags of states that no longer exist and, at the same time, serves the artist to re-examine the limits of painting. The work focuses on the flags of Yugoslavia, flags of the constituent republics and provinces, of labour unions and the Communist Party.
The belief system whose values were projected to these flags is no longer present and they remain as the “death masks” of the ideology that once established them. Through an almost invisible process that puts on test painting as a tool for interpreting history, Grubanov transfers the anima of these “dead flags” into the realm of the representational. He soaks the authentic flags in a mix of acrylic paints and various chemicals, until they leave the image (trace) of their folds and symbols onto a clean piece of canvas. The resulting paintings are not guided by the artist’s hand or intention, but present a piece of evidence left by the “dead flags”, the genuine outlines and the fluids of their remains. The biopolitical influence of the flag – the flag of an ideological set that no longer exists – was replaced by the biopolitical potency of the painting on canvas, which continues conditioning our lives by its semantic and formal persuasiveness, generating a renewal of the belief system.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase and Gift Contract: III-5-528/1/24.12.2014.
Inventory No. 1394
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Selected Bibliography:
Ivan Grubanov – Dead Flags, text for the exhibition at Loock Galerie, Berlin, DE, 19.9 – 2.11.2013. Available at http://loock.info/kuenstler/ivan-grubanov/ausstellungen/2013/dead-flags/ (accessed on Mar. 17, 2020.)
Ivan Grubanov, United Dead Nations, Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia, 56th Venice Art Biennale, May 9 – Nov. 22, 2015, Commissioner/Curator Lidija Merenik, Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, 2015. Available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.714.552&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed on Mar. 17, 2020.)
Grubanov, Ivan and Peter Vermeersch, UNNATION: A Conversation. Publisher: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2016
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ivan Grubanov (1976, Belgrade, Serbia) graduated and received his master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He completed his specialist studies at the Rijks Academy in Amsterdam, Delfina Foundation Studio Programme in London and Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. As a scholarship holder – researcher, he has attended professional training courses in Amsterdam, London and Madrid. He has been present on the contemporary visual art scene in the country and abroad since 1997 and has presented his paintings, drawings and installations at solo exhibitions at reputable institutions and events in the country and abroad. He represented Serbia at the 56th Venice Biennale. His works are part of the collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, the Deutsche Bank Collection in Frankfurt and many others. Since 2015 he has been working at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. More information at https://grubanov.wordpress.com/
Jan Fabre
I am a one man movement
bic blue ink, lead-free crystal glass
487.3 cm x 35.5 cm
2011
The original work was created in 1983 in the Flemish language and could most closely be translated as “I am a one man movement”. For the needs of the 52nd October Salon, Jan Fabre produced his work in English and donated it to the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the organizer of the exhibition. With this act, he encouraged not only other artists who exhibited at the October Salon to do the same, but also the abovementioned institution to establish a collection of works of art – the October Salon Collection.
Although interpretations of the work in Fabre’s oeuvre may have multiple levels of reading, this sentence indicates the relationship of the artist and his environment, as well as the idea of creating his own reality. Almost all the elements recognizable for Jan Fabre’s art practice permeate in it. On the one hand, the use of Bic blue ink is associated with the “hour blue”, the periods just before sunrise and after sunset – when the artist works the most. This is the moment when nocturnal animals go to sleep, and the diurnal wake up (remember Fabre’s project Nose Laboratory, a nose tent in which, as a 20-year-old, he followed and studied the world of arthropods), the period of heightened creative energy. That mysterious blue twilight is a suggestive metaphor for the realm of imagination, interpreted as the liberating potentiality of true experience during which, among other things, Jan Fabre writes his Night Diaries. Fabre finds the same magic and power in glass, too, which is a symbol of hardness and fragility, as is the artist himself.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Production: Angelos bvba Antwerp
Gift Contract No. III-52-4053/13.12.2011.
Inventory No. 1371
Photo: Milan Kralj
Selected Bibliography:
52nd October Salon, It’s Time We Met Each Other. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2011
Jan Fabre, Die Jahre Blauen Stunde – The Years of the Hour Blue, edited by Sabine Haag, Kunsthistorishe Museum 4.5 – 28.8.2011, Kunsthistorishe Museum, Wien, 2011
Facing Time, Rops/Fabre, Somogy Editions d’art, Paris, 2015
Jan Fabre, Glass and Bone Sculptures 1977–2017, Abazzia di San Gregorio, Venezia, 13.5 – 26.11.2017, Forma Edizioni, 2017
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jan Fabre (1958, Antwerp, Belgium) is considered one of the most innovative and versatile figures in the contemporary international art scene, where he has distinguished himself as a visual and theatre artist and writer. He describes himself as a consilience artist, someone who is constantly searching for bridges between different disciplines. Thanks to this undertaking, he gives fresh interpretations to the world of visual art, theatre and literature.
Jan Fabre has exhibited his works at major international exhibitions and museums such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, the São Paulo Biennial, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the St. Petersburg State Hermitage Museum, and others. More information at https://www.janfabre.be/
Nikola Džafo
The Rabbit Who Ate a Museum
mixed media – book and stand
82 cm x 62 cm x 13 cm, 110 cm x 90 cm x 60 cm
2000–2016
The work was created after a long-term project / action of the artist, which he started in 1999 as part of the exhibition and performance Departure into Whiteness, when he invited friends and acquaintances to intervene on 12 white canvases in a gallery on the topic: rabbit. Namely, for the artist, the rabbit is a metaphor for the problems and diseases of our society, the local community, but also for joy, success and satisfaction.
During the exhibition, a large number of drawings, prints, collages, ad hoc creations, toys and objects in the shape of a rabbit were collected, which became the basis of a future Museum and the book The Rabbit Who Ate a Museum. Since then, The Rabbit Who Ate a Museum has branched out in several directions: as a private museum exhibition whose fund is increasing every day (it now comprises more than 2,000 items on the theme of rabbit), but also as a socially and politically engaged project with intense exhibiting activity.
The work was exhibited at the 48th October Salon: Micro-Narratives in 2007, under the title The Memorial Museum of the Rabbit Who Ate a Museum.
The work deals with the question of how to oppose destruction and insanity; how to, in bad times, stop making art or react polemically. The idea of a hand-made book-object arose in 2000, as a need to unite and systematize the donated works. The collection includes more than 300 items (drawings, collages, prints, computer prints, photographs), by Belgrade and Novi Sad artists, but also contributions from anonymous creators, exhibition visitors, friends, children, rabbit admirers and fans. The formidable material and the endeavour resulted in an imposing book, with the rabbit fur cover. Due to its weight and dimensions (51 pages and 15 kilograms), a special wrought iron stand (“cradle”) was made for N. Džafo’s book, inspired by an illumination from a manuscript book kept in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. As an integral part of the on-going project The Rabbit Who Ate a Museum, the book has grown, experienced changes, followed the flows in its exhibition activity, but is now ready to separate and continue its own life as an independent entity.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-385/16.11.2016.
Inventory No. 1456
Photo: Milan Kralj, installation view 48th October Salon
Selected Bibliography:
48th October Salon, Micro-Narratives. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2007
Nikola Džafo: Lepus in fabula, Feb. 23 – Mar. 15, 2011, catalogue of the solo exhibition, text by curator Živko Grozdanić, Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, 2011
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nikola Džafo (1950, Novi Sad, Serbia) graduated in painting (1978) and received a master’s degree (1981) from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He conceived and initiated the Led Art Group (1993), co-founded the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade (1995) and the Led Art Multimedia Centre in Novi Sad (2000). In the basement at 5, Grčkoškolska Street, with a group of young artists from Novi Sad, he started Art Clinic, a project with the utopian idea that art can change and heal the world, which in 2013 was transformed into SHOCK Cooperative. He has presented his works at a number of group and solo exhibitions throughout Serbia and the region. He won the Politika Award (2012) for the exhibition Lepus in fabula, MSUV, Novi Sad, in 2011. Lives and works in Novi Sad. More information at http://www.dzafo.com/