Summer School as School
3- 18 July, 2016
Public Program
Wednesday, 6 July 2016 at 20:15
Branislav Dimitrijević: A post-curatorial statement
Venue: Boxing Club
Mark Isaku St. Prishtina
Republic of Kosovo
The talk deals with the paradigmatic changes in the notion of curatorship since the emergence of the academic discipline of 'curatorial studies'. The talk would also present a personal journey through the changes of the relations between art and art-system (and having in mind the role of a curator as a mediator between the two) within the socio-economic and political context of the so called “post-socialism”.
It is about the perversions of the beuysian promise that everybody will become an artist and it is about the ‘democratisation' of art turned sweet and sour. It is about the coalitions of the opposites - of the flatness of art and the verticality of power. It is about the ways of thinking what curating in post-artistic times may imply.
Post-curating is seen here primarily as an art of public discourse. This does not only mean that curating is about placing art in public context, but also about working within the particularities of certain communities and their habits and discourses. But it is not about finding a righteous social role for art, it is about the urgency to stop for a moment and look around in order to become socially and politically enabled to think possible and impossible modes for (post-) artistic autonomy.
Dr Branislav Dimitrijević is Professor of History and Theory of Art at the School for Art and Design and Nova Academia in Belgrade. He also teaches at the Curatorial Practice course at the Belgrade University of Arts (Erasmus Programme). Main field of his historical research is visual art, popular culture and film in socialist Yugoslavia. As a curator he explores “site-specificity” and “physical narrativity” in contemporary art and politics of display. His curatorial projects include:Murder1 (CZKD, Belgrade, 1997), Konverzacija (MOCAB, 2001), Situated Self: Confused, Compassionate, Conflictual (Helsinki City Museum; MOCAB, 2005),Breaking Step – Displacement, Compassion and Humour in recent art from Britain (MOCAB, 2007), FAQ Serbia (ACF, New York, 2010), No Network (D0 Nuclear bunker, Konjic, Bosnia, 2011), etc.
In the last twenty years he has written and edited numerous books and catalogues including On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989-2001 (MOCA Belgrade, 2005), Good Life: Physical Narratives and Spatial Imagination (Belgrade Cultural Centre, 2012) and most recently GoranDjordjević - Against Art (MOCA Belgrade, 2014). Since 2014 he regularly writes on political and cultural issues for “Peščanik” web portal (http://pescanik.net/author/branislav-dimitrijevic/).
Dimitrijević holds an MA degree in History and Theory of Art from the University of Kent (UK), and has received his PhD in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies from the University of Arts in Belgrade for the thesis on the emergence of consumer culture in the socialist Yugoslavia.
Selected texts available at: https://independent.academia.edu/BranislavDimitrijevic