[artinfo] [Fwd] History started playing with my life,

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Datum: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 05:22:35 -0700 (PDT)
Von: Erzen Shkololli <erzenshkololli at yahoo.com>
Betreff: History started playing with my life


History started playing with my life

16.09- 29.09.2005

Curator: Erzen Shkololli

Artists Participating:

Maja Bajevic

Sokol Beqiri

Goran Devic

Dalibor Martinis

Sejla Kameric

Anri Sala

Milica Tomic

Jasmila Zbanic



Opening, Friday:

16.09.2005, 20:00

Organized by:The Kosovo Art Gallery

“Conflict, trauma, militarism, cultural erasure, 
redefinition of identities, collapsing systems, 
cultural revolutions, ethnical cleansing, 
migration, post-communism, globalization, modes 
of capitalism, unions, global and local 
realities, televised realities, privatization, 
possession, occupation, segregation, separation, 
borders, ignorance..."

When start to think about this project to due e 
video exhibition it crossed my mind that today 
there are many situation in the world that might 
match with such description. However, looking 
back into my personal story, experience and 
historical background I realized that there's one 
matching perfectly almost all the definitions 
given above, and that is the situation in ex 
Yugoslavia, as biggest geographical area in the 
Balkans. Thus I started to parade an endless 
number of works from many artists that have dealt 
with this situation, until I decided to track 
down a red thread that links several of them, as 
distinguished from the others. Since my point of 
departure was my personal experience of such 
situation I started to look for artists who have 
dealt with the above situations also from a 
personal perspective and experience. Thus the red 
thread which makes these artists works correspond 
with each other: each work shows an aspect of the 
war or of its consequences as experienced 
individually from these artists. Besides, the 
works are related to social, political and 
cultural changes in real time but in different 
circumstances. They are dealing with identity 
issues, as well as with issues of history and 
memory, consequences and trauma from the war, and 
so on and so forth. But all of this presented 
from a very personal experience, drawn out of 
personal encounters or perceptions of what has 
been going on in this area plagued by 
restlessness.

What makes it even more thrilling to me is that 
in these “personalized” works we move away from a 
standard notion of geography as physical 
territory, and enter some kind of "personal 
geography" that helps presenting the works not as 
a philosophic generalization on war or conflict, 
but as something suffered directly on one's skin. 
As Maja Bajevic, artist from Sarajevo says: 
“Tragedies like war and the disintegration of a 
country are usually seen as general, political 
things. Actually there are personal, very 
personal events of our lives that we carry, and 
wear like a dress.” One can see that war was a 
very personal event of their lives. And also what 
is important to mention is the generation of the 
artists selected; they belong to a generation 
that witnessed all these changes and also had a 
chance to live in the time when ex-Yugoslavia 
still existed as one country, (Tito time); then 
they're gone through Milosevic's regime; and then 
we have the generation of artists how they grew 
up during the wartime.

Erzen Shkololli