Die Ausstellung „Beograd/Belgrad - just visiting" präsentiert eine Reihe junger Künstler aus Belgrad, geboren in der Hauptstadt, zwischen Mitte und Ende der 1970er Jahre. Da diese Generation während des Kriegsgeschehens der 1990er Jahren nicht in verantworlichen Positionen tätig war, sind sie in einem Umfeld aufgewachsen, das ihnen einen kritischen Umgang mit der Geschichte ermöglicht. Sie können sich aber weder den Bürgerkriegsthemen noch deren Auswirkungen auf die heutige Gesellschaft entziehen. Die Künstler präsentieren in Einzelarbeiten ihren Blick auf gesellschaftliche Prozesse und Themen aus ihrer unmittelbaren Umgebung, so etwa auf die durch das Ende des Kommunismus funktionslos gewordene und isolierte Community von Chinesen in Belgrad (One way ticket, von Milena Maksimovic) oder die Auseinandersetzung mit neuen „Idealen" (Lucky couples, von Maja Rakocevic).

Um weitere Perspektiven auf das Thema zu eröffnen, finden im Kontext der Ausstellung zwei Vorträge/Präsentationen über neue Mediengruppen aus Serbien/Montenegro statt. Diese repräsentieren die kritische Sichtweise der älteren Generation. Das Paradigma ihrer künstlerischen Praxis richtet sich darauf, sich als Teil der international vernetzte Szene zu verstehen und sich auf das Gegenwärtige und Zukünftige zu konzentrieren, um damit das Klischee der hermeneutisch abgeschlossenen Gesellschaft zu widerlegen.

Die Künstlergruppe Urtica präsentiert am 23. November einige ihrer Projekte, unter anderem das Werk „mouse says: click! And human says: eek!", für welches sie 2003 mit dem UNESCO Digital Arts Award ausgezeichnet wurden. Am 8. Dezember stellen sich kuda.org vor. Die Medienkunstinitiative aus Novi Sad hat nach dem Ende des Milosevic-Regimes zur Öffentlichkeitsbildung beigetragen, indem sie sich selbstverständlich in die internationale Kunstszene eingliederten, anstatt Kapital aus der Besonderheit ihrer traumatischen lokalen Erfahrungen zu schlagen. Kuratiert von Mirjana Peitlerin Zusammenarbeit mit Sasa Janjic (Gallerie Remont Belgrad) und Patrick Huber (Kunstraum Walcheturm)

Für die Realisierung dieses Projektes danken wir:
Allen freiwilligen Helfer // Österreichisches Generalkonsulat Zürich // Wildprovider.ch // Rüdigerstrasse

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Ausstellungswerke:
Nenad Kostic: For all that you did to me, DVD/
Viktor Sekularac: Air struggle, Fotoprints /
Ivana Jaksic: Visa, Oil-Paintings
Milena Gordic Putnik: Air line
Milena Maksimovic: One way ticket, Photo on DVD
Maja Radanovic: Creatures, 13 Sculptures
Nenad Kostic: For all the pain you’ve infected upon me / let’s merge in suffering

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For all the pain you’ve infected upon me / let’s merge in suffering / Nenad Kostic
How to explain something that goes all the way back to me sloshing in my fathers testicles, and certainly even much further back…
And in this infinite infantile attempt to understand, my father asks me to do a tattoo for him,
on him.
A chance ?! For what?
Symbolic? Of what?
And when I finally say yes, even if only to gain some small satisfaction from all this father/son business, the man dozes off, doesn’t feel a thing.
Alexander the Great on the left shoulder, Joan of Arc on the right…

Air struggle / Viktor Sekularac
Struggle for air – fear of suffocation, symbolises a lot more then we are prepared to admit at first sight. Art has always been a struggle, a struggle with the environment and, most of all, with us. One of the sine qua non conditions of any creative process is transcending the limits all societies set by definition. Art that originates in a closed, xenophobic society, which disrespects basic freedoms, carries a certain mark of social engagement that is not so obvious at fist sight. Socially engaged art is often neglected or, even more, criticised - but that is forgetting the fact that a rebel against rules and social injustices, as well as the utopist idea that a different world is possible, is essential to the very core of modernity. Air Struggle is much more then just revolt of a young artist who cannot accept the existing state of art establishment. After all,
What does the existing art system have to offer to a young artist?(Sa_a Janji_)

Visa / Ivana Jaksic
The paintings in a series called "Visas" are basically the exact copies of actual visas from the passports but the personal data are erased in order to maintain anonymous. It’s about inability to travel freely, but also to be an equal member of the European family. This piece of paper represents a constant frustration for the people from the countries in transition, so ironically, it becomes one of the modern icons because of what it represents, which people from the West take for granted.

Air line / Milena Gordic Putnik
In my paintings and works with photography I explore my everyday surroundings.
I am interested in how the way we look affects on what we will actually see: our position, duration of watching and changes that time brings both on us and the object of our observation.
I explore situations where our experience of duration varies. A very short moment, when expanded in frames seems longer and intensified, or, when we are looking at a vast space in aerial photograph, time seems contracted.

Lucky couples / Maja Rakocevic
In this series of works I would like to respond to the stereotypes created by the media. Using artistic means I imitate situations in which I represent my own body in an ideal fantasy picture of the "happy couple". Photos of commercials where couples are shown in romantic plots, where love is reachable and "happy end" is attainable, become the basic mark of the ideology of the consumer society. The most evident result of such a society is the constant evasion of one’s ideal identity as a desired object.

One way ticket / Milena Maksimovic
Belgrade is still not one of the world’s capital cities, although there’s about 40000 Chinese living in Serbia today, according to media estimates. There are no official data.
The Belgrade daily “Vecernje novosti” states that all inhabitants of the Chinese village of King Tiu, in the Zhejiang province, have moved to Belgrade! More precisely, they’re all in the New Belgrade housing estate Block 70, where they sell cheap general goods, while the Chinese village stands deserted, or so its ex-inhabitants claim.
Some of them were paid one way train ticket just to move out of China, but most of them immigrated to this part of the world because “Serbia has greater opportunities than China”.
The question of opportunities is, of course, always ambivalent and projective; the question of life in the Belgrade’s Chinese community is imbued with different forms of class, racial and legal segregation.

Creatures / Maja Radanovic
The idea was to create the illusion of body with its no-presence. And with the work’s setup (with black cloths, in the dark, printed eyes) I wanted to enlarge the national stereotype and the tension that is constantly present and that kept rising in spectator’s observation of the work.