onaj drugi

“Walkthrough”

Specifications: Installation of variable dimensions, HD video, b/w, stereo sound, 38’ 38’’, 2021 

“Walkthrough” is a short black­ and­ white film that uses a doc­umentary approach to record a first­ person speech by another  artist and visionary about his project for a self-sustaining en­gine of contemporary art that combines a new production with a form of legacy/museum. Throughout the film, Stošić does not speak, giving completely the floor to the author he is recording. The film is therefore shot as a curatorial or artistic guidance and is a walk through an architectural object that is “conceived on the principle of a work of art” and in which each part has its own purpose. According to its author, this building is “more of a sculpture than a museum” – it combines his experience as an artist and his experience as a director of the Museum of Con­ temporary Art, and he describes this process as an act of activ­ism in the field of culture. 

Conceiving the museum as a meeting place, and not just as a place to store objects from the past, the author leads us from segment to segment of the architectural object, explaining their functions. One segment was dedicated to documentation of his works, followed by a library with publications and documen­tary materials, then with a gallery of current artistic practices of which he was the selector, as well as with a part that is a spe­cific cultural centre where interaction between the people and the object takes place, and in which the local people become an active audience of contemporary art. As he moves through the building, we see that it is completely ruined, as well as the doc­umentation that was in it. 

As the author suffered a stroke in the meantime, the building was completely devastated. On the floor of what was a legacy/ library, we see only torn pieces of books, which he calls a con­ceptual work that presents the fate of art if there is no institu­tion, and suggests that those pieces should be picked up and placed somewhere “to be a trace, not just a memory.” Despite that, aware that this object and concept are created after the end of art history, he announces that he will revitalise it again, as his health improves. According to him, it is a way to revitalise one’s own biography, which, according to him, is a way to overcome the crisis of museums and contemporary culture. With this an­nouncement of revitalisation, “Walkthrough” ends. 

Architecture in Slobodan Stošić’s film is a testimony to the at­ tempt to create a decentralized hybrid concept of contemporary culture that brings new dynamics to the rural environment, but also to the much wider crisis of museums and the crisis of in­frastructure for contemporary art. The architecture and ruin of the internal content of the building also testify to what happens when such an initiative is undertaken by an individual without institutional support, who at some point is prevented from de­voting himself to the project.  Stošić’s film thus becomes a cura­torial work that documents the current phase of this building, which its author himself considers to be more of a work of art than a museum. 

Sonja Jankov

Welcome to the “Hotel Kosovo”.

Dear visitor, we are all subjected to the lack of certain images, which must be produced so we could fill in the blanks of the official image of community, and you are invited to decide for yourself what might be the meaning and legitimacy of such declaration; while the act of speculation is highly necessary, because it enables us to think of different modes of community, going beyond the divide of our current determinations. Our six star hotel is an attempt in producing a singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of names and references that constitute our daily life.

Dezerters’ Bazaar in Tbilisi, and former hotel Abkhazia in Sukhumi, as symptoms of the despised older order, including the parallel association with IDPs, also became objects of privatization and a fetish (a portent of the utopian future). Two geographical locations are given a name of a third one, as a commentary of the unconscious, mine, and everyone else’s who lived in sequences of division of states, war and migration. These locations are suspended between history and presence, between personal and official narratives, between nationalistic and european spheres, in so many “in between’s”, and they stay in this condition of suspension, only if we don’t re-use that methodology so we could distance ourself from the state narratives, until we open a range of possible readings that are not suppose to be a declaration, but rather a refusal of metonymy.

Name of the hotel is a conceptual event, a montage that addresses the loss of a contact in a community, which is embedded in an abstract background formulated by every state. So, for a facility offering hospitality to travellers, there is no more suitable name then the one that rep- resents for someone a foreign and not acknowledged entity. Like so many other names that we must search until we all acknowledge ourself as foreigners.

Welcome, we wish you a pleasant stay in our hotel.

Photo: Alexander Bagration-Davitashvili and Arkhip Labakhua

(О)pozicije / (O)positions

video, dvokanalna instalacija sa zvukom / video, two-channel video projection with sound 9’ 40’’, loop, 2020.

snimatelji / cinematographers: Arnold Fernandes, Filip Markovinović montaža / editing: Filip Markovinović, Slobodan Stošić

zvuk / sound:  Filip Markovinović bubnjar / a drummer:  Borislav Prodanović

Michel Foucault “What is an Author?”

“Dead Letters”

I re-wrote entire Herman Melville’s novel “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, by hand, in a manner of a scrivener. It is a drawing, in a certain way, but strictly conceptual act, done as a performative gesture, in order to locate the position between ‘acceptance’ and ‘refusal’. But to ‘see’ such a position, is to question how do symbolic structures (language and image) mark the subject in a particular way.

 Drawing, as an imperfect repetition, provides for the given context a certain kind of foreign language, a statement, which offers a choice. Bartleby’s formula is used as a motive for creating, a setup of undistinguished traits and characters that are searching for different responses to the world and objects in that world.

 Another conceptual segment of “Dead Letters” is a series of drawings entitled “The Voice Imitator”, divided into drawings on mat (passepartout) and several smaller drawings. This segment ensures a framework for the composition; a narrative, which touches upon and revolves around composing images out of different sources, and with different approaches to the medium of drawing that in their content deals with moments of decision and a judgment, as a distance but also as a refusal.

 Between singularities and assemblages, drawing is thinking about choices and making them. Extracted from the patterns of instituting significations, the acts that are depicted by the images, offer this possibility of a subject confronting its limits and restraints- by a present possibility of redirecting the gaze. Here, the medium of drawing is used as an orientation, rather than as information.

more images: http://www.galeriedix9.com/fr/artistes/oeuvres/9620/slobodan-stosic#oeuv-18

“Portrait of Zoran Đinđić in the Style of Jackson Pollock”

Conceptual Atelier, Group for conceptual politics, 2017

Thinking of the artist or catastrophe

“Dead Letters“

40 pages, size of one page is 10,5 x 15 cm. 2017

“Wiping the forehead of…“ The box containing 60 tissues is offered to the audience to use it in accordance to their needs. Each tissue is an episode, a sheet filled with jottings, a thought, a copy, a tweet. It takes on a form of a seemingly disconnected diary, joint together by a fragile structure of interlaced tissues.

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