Love It Or Leave It: Bringing Balkan Back to the Balkans
By Ana Devic
The mobilization strategy of the actual potentials of ‘Balkans in the Balkan,’ as presented by the Cetinje Biennial V, was a meaningful attempt to reposition the specific ‘otherness’ of the Balkans in the context of its wider thematicization–one which often characterizes the Balkans as the semi-wild, semi-tame exotic inverse of Europe.
The Cetinje Biennial V is a continuation and synthesis of ideas of the complex project "Balkan Trilogy" whose initiator was Ren� Block–director of Kunsthalle Fridericianum- Kassel and curator of the exhibition "In the Gorges of the Balkans" which kicked off the trilogy a year ago in Kassel. This initiated a chain of long-term cooperation continued throughout 2004 with the project "In the Cities of the Balkans". With the strategic relocation of presenting the Balkans outside Western European space, a new space was opened for articulation, empowering its creators to sidestep the clich�d perceptions in which geographically orientated exhibitions tend to fall. A number of intense and diverse activities carried out by partners in Belgrade, Bucharest, Cetinje, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, Ljubljana, Prishtina, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofia, Tirana and Zagreb were realized within the framework of the project "In the Cities of the Balkans". Affirming the exceptional critical potential of these artistic points marked by Southeast Europe on one side and the Middle East on the other, the Biennial situated the Balkans as a specific gap in Europe, its indivisible part, into the transit zone to the Middle East. Engulfing such a defined cultural-geographic territory, the Biennial outlines the trajectory of artistic strategies developed back in the 1960s and 70s with artists of the next generations.
Various emancipatory artistic practices directly reflect the turbulent happenings of this region–events of varying magnitudes within particular local scenes, which were generally marked by an unstable political climate, wars, the rise of nationalism and ruined local economies. The work of Turkish artist Halil Altindere — the slogan from his work provided the title for the Cetinje Biennial V — vividly points to these processes. ‘Love it or leave it’ by Altindere refers to a specific Turkish situation in the 90s in which the dilemma to love or to leave is broken down into a series of disturbing questions tied in with the problem of ethnic discrimination. The photograph shows Istanbul curator Erden Kosova and the artist himself in front of a wall, where the slogan ‘Love it or leave it’ is written, walking away in opposite directions. If we read this slogan as a figuration of the geographical map of Turkey, we can also read the dynamics of various global political currents but also the intimate paths of the protagonists themselves from the photo.
As Natasa Ilic, co-curator of the Biennial along with Ren� Block, points out: "The slogan ‘Love it or leave it’ has long since lost its sentimental connotations and is nowadays connected to conservative demagogies. This slogan also circles around the ambiguity of inner and internalized ‘emotional’ relations toward the Balkans. In many ways, it reflects the narcissistic, childish position that is the expression of prejudice that the Balkans cannot change its wild substance, and that it must be accepted the way it is…"
If we take into consideration the conflicts and unresolved relations between the countries and cities — Cetinje (Montenegro); Dubrovnik (Croatia); Shkodar and Tirana (Albania) — where this year’s Biennial was located, the well-known insistence on "initiating dialogue in the region" becomes, in fact, a key moment of activity. ‘Love it or leave it’ at the same time rejects its central form of a self-sufficient one-time biennial spectacle intended primarily for the artworld; instead, through its own phases, it invests in various local milieus, sketching new guidelines for relocating the entity of the biennial into the zone of regions which are close both in terms of distance and shared history but far in terms of the ways in which they function. The opening of this year’s Cetinje Biennial and a significant segment of the exhibition in Dubrovnik, Croatia, manifests itself as a courageous and meaningful curatorial gesture. A fairly negative disposition toward cultural cooperation with Serbia and Montenegro still rules in Croatia, the mutual relations between Serbia and Montenegro is also marked by numerous tensions and differences of opinion, and the complex of problems regarding the status of the Albanian minority still remains unresolved within ex-Yugoslavia. The structure of the Biennial, which takes place in Croatia, Montenegro and Albania has clearly positioned itself in tactical role. Beginning in Dubrovnik, the Biennial culminated in Cetinje, and was accompanied by a series of workshops in Tirana and Shkodar.
The specific social prism of the Biennial resulted in sometimes painful confrontations with local communities, handling delicate social issues which have been swept ‘under the carpet’ for decades now. The process of working off these problematic traumas achieved its distinct manifestation in one of the 6 Cetinje venues for the Biennial, in the space of the former Serbian embassy. This space was used to present a series of works by artists who directly question the series of negative side effects of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
In relation to specific local circumstances of Cetinje, former capital of independent Montenegro state at the times before any Yugoslavia, and today cultural capital of the Republic (but not the state yet), pauperized by years of the EU economical sanctions and even more so by recent economical regulations undertaken with the goal to approach EU in not so distant future, "Cetinje Biennial V" draws from internal non-consistency of the notion of Balkans and its symbolic potentials.
The specific social prism of the Biennial resulted in the sometimes painful confrontation with local communities with some delicate social issues which have been swept ‘under the carpet’ for decades now. The process of working off these problematic traumas achieved its distinct manifestation in one of the 6 Cetinje venues for the Biennial, in the space of the former Serbian embassy. This space was used to present a series of works by artists who directly question the series of negative side effects of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Along with the work of Milica Tomi� who concerns herself with the "impossible gaze" upon Belgrade in 2001, from the perspective of one of the hanged members of the antifascist movement from 1941 — and who never had a monument commemorated in their honor — and which refers to the problematic relation towards the antifascist struggle in contemporary Serbia, the work of Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovi� is concerned with the related problem of social amnesia from the viewpoint of contemporary Croatian society.
The video by Bosnian artist Maja Bajevi attempts to work off the experience of the horrors of war in Sarajevo during the 90s with the help of the obsessive retelling of brutal war jokes while the video by Marina Abramovi� in which the artist is on a white horse singing the former national hymn of Yugoslavia, a forgotten archive of a now nonexistent country, is a nostalgic interrelation with one’s own history. Not one of the works at the Biennial caused as tumultuous a reaction as did the work of young Kosovar artist Albert Heta who rigged up a Kosovo embassy directly on the fa�ade of the building of the former Serbian embassy during the duration of the Biennial and in this way mobilized the Montenegrin public; these actions gradually brought about the destruction and withdrawal of the work. Heta, with this act, directly posed some key questions: not only concrete questions regarding the repression and disturbed dysfunctionality of that state, but also the crucial question of the right to independence of the imagination and autonomy of art, precisely in the symbolic and real territory of a state which has already for decades aggressively ignored the autonomy of Kosovo Albanians. As one of the local journalist who situated this project in a local cultural and political context asserted — that which actually scandalized the Montenegrin public was, in fact, reality.
Even though, at first glance, it might seem that interest in the contemporary artistic landscape of the geopolitical terrain tagged as the Balkans is slowly waning, and that its culmination was reached with the wave of several large exhibitions that splashed across Western Europe last year, The Cetinje Biennial made certain that the story of the Balkans is just beginning to be realized.
Cetinje Biennial V
Cetinje, Dubrovnik, Tirana
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
Curated by Ren� Block & Nata_a Ili�
Cetinje, Montenegro
28/08 —19/09/2004
exhibition venues: Njego_ Museum, Ethnography Museum, Obod Factory, Blue Palace, Art Museum of Montenegro
Biennial video programme: Former bar Sirius
Cetinje, Montenegro
20/07-19/092004
‘Orchid’, curated by: Petar �ukovi�
exhibition venue: former Prison Bogdanov kraj
Dubrovnik, Croatia
17/07 —20/08/2004
exhibition venues: Gallery Otok, Lazareti
Biennial video programme: Lazareti
Tirana, Albania
20/8 —19/09/2004
Biennial video programme: National Gallery of Arts Tirana
Shkoder, Albania
21/8 —28/08/2004
workshops with students from art academies of Tirana, Cetinje, Munich and Kassel
