[spectre] Fwd: exh. Kosovo: History started playing with my life, cur. Erzen Shkololli

[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 - Opening, Friday:16.09.2005,
20:00 - Organized by:The Kosovo Art Gallery - Curator: Erzen Shkololli


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





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