Muzej savremene umjetnosti<br />Republike Srpske

Museum of Contemporary Art
of Republic of Srpska

/ Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
May 13 – November 26, 2017

 

After the participation of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Biennale Arte in 2003 and 2013, Bosnia and Herzegovina will also present itself at the forthcoming 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, with the project ‘’University of Disaster’’.

This participation aims to initiate the establishment of continuity of exhibiting within which this country would be present not only in the International Art Exhibition, but also at the Biennale Architettura.The decision concerning the participation was brought by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the project was officially supported by the Ministry of Civil Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Srpska.

Artist Radenko Milak will represent Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with the project ‘’University of Disaster’’ in collaboration with Roman Uranjek, and guest artists Lamin Fofana, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena, Loulou Cherinet, Geraldine Juárez in collaboration with Joel Danielsson, Nils Bech in collaboration with Ida Ekblad.

Commissioner of the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina is Sarita Vujković, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republic of Srpska, and curators that had been chosen to make an international curatorial of this project are: Cristopher Yggdre, Fredrik Svensk, Sinziana Ravini, Ana van der Vliet, which will work in collaboration and with the support of Hans Urlich Obrist. Organiser of this whole project is the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republic of Srpska, and which has decided, along with the artist Radenko Milak, that the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be located at the Palazzo Malipiero, S. Marco 3198, Venice, the venue in which the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina was located during the 55th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia in 2013.

As with the realisation of the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Biennale Arte 2013, long-term goal of this institution is to set new parametres when it comes to this kind of organisation and to, thanks to this international project, connect with other institutions and artists in order to improve the development of the contemporary art scene in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

UNIVERSITY OF DISASTER

What would happen if we rewrote the history of art solely from the perspective of the representation of catastrophe? Original or final, the catastrophe, with its natural cataclysms, epidemics and human activities such as war and conflicts, has always had an aesthetic dimension and an impact on our desire, imagination and our relation to the world. This is something that one can hardly ignore encountering the art of the artist Radenko Milak from Bosnia and Herzegovina - a work totally in line with what Modern History teaches us, that catastrophes are not external or independent to us: we are its demiurges. After the second world war, the German philosopher, Günther Anders, considered Auschwitz and Hiroshima the two founding events of an era in which humanity has become incapable of representing what it has set up or created.

The impossibility of representing catastrophe is, paradoxically enough, not related to the absence of documentation, in particular of visual documentation. The unrepresentable is primarily defined as the inability to take measure of disaster. At the same time disaster and desire share the same distant etymology. “University of Disaster” can therefore also be read as “University of Desire”, desire as antidote to the crushing feeling of powerlessness in the face of surrounding disaster. What can art do in this new era of unrepresentable disaster? What is the relation between disaster and desire today?

Through his work, Radenko Milak questions the imagination of the image in the digital era. His practice involves the real or supposed power of images and their status in our visually saturated societies. He reveals the aesthetic potential and phantoms of each image that haunt our consciences by creating unfaithful echoes of the continuous flow of images in our global visual archive. For this exhibition, the artist has created a Wunderkammer of films, paintings, watercolors, collages, some in collaboration with Roman Uranjek, which gives the political, social and environmental disasters an entirely new dimension, inviting us to drift towards the horizons of a world where art becomes the last form of resistance to current and future disasters.

The guest artists in this exhibition are engaged in other aspects of the disasters and desires of our time, confronting, contradicting and adding to the proposals by Radenko Milak and Roman Uranjek, turning the exhibition into a complex montage, inviting the audience to make up new connections between the tensions in the works. The beauty of unrequited love in the performance work of Nils Bech with Ida Ekblad, is played out in the context of the magic of the feminist intervention by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, subverting the power and desire in the sexist matrix of contemporary digital pornography, accompanied by the brutal bliss of Lamin Fofana´s techno music installation reflecting the horrors of forced migration, in contrast to the seductive contradictions of Geraldine Juárez´s frozen installation that stores, layers and fuses geologies and memories against the backdrop of desires and disasters of media history and climate change, and the powerful camouflage of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena´s installation on the expanded potential of the strategy of camouflage in a world of disasters.

But, “University of Disaster” is not only the exhibition at the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina of the 57th International Art Exhibition − La Biennale di Venezia, it is also the starting point for a real university, a shared creative space of knowledge and imagination building, a laboratory. It is at the same time an artistic and political proposal, a project in the making. A conference will be held in Venice with writers, researchers, theorists and artists in November during the last week of the Biennale Arte 2017. For this occasion, a new commissioned work by Loulou Cherinet will be presented.

 

Commissioner:
Sarita Vujković, Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska.

Curators:
Fredrik Svensk, Sinziana Ravini, Anna van der Vliet, Christopher Yggdre,
in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Exhibitors:
Radenko Milak in collaboration with Roman Uranjek,
and guest artists: Lamin Fofana, Sidsel Meineche Hansen,
Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena, Loulou Cherinet,
Geraldine Juárez in collaboration with Joel Danielsson,
Nils Bech in collaboration with Ida Ekblad.

Collaborators:
Mladen Banjac (deputy curator), Roberto Zancan (architect),
Nemanja Mićević (graphic designer), Branka Šestić (PR),
Mladen Šukalo (technical development) Nenad Markić (technical development),
Julie Banâtre, Maša Davidović, Léa Perrier, Lana Pilipović, Predrag Terzić, Lucie Touya

Organization and Production:
Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska, L’Agence à Paris

With the main support of:
Ministry of Civil Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Ministry of Education and Culture of Republika Srpska,
City of Banja Luka

With the additional support of:
Iaspis - The Swedish Art Grants Committe’s International Programme
for Visual and Applied Artists,
OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway),
FCC (Fondo Concursable para la Cultura) MEC,
Ministerio de Educación y Cultura - Uruguay.

GALLERY | PRISKA PASQUER, La Balsa Arte, Les Filles du Calvaire Gallery,
Duplex/100m2, Galerija Fotografija, ICIA - Institute for Contemporary Ideas and Art, Paletten Art Journal.

 

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://msurs.net/index.php/en/izlozbe-6/la-biennale/biennale2017-3/664-paviljon-bosne-i-hercegovine-na-57-medunarodnoj-izlozbi-umjetnosti-la-biennale-di-venezia-13-maj-26-novembar-2017-godine-3#sigProIdb61beab5e9