Course 7: Discussion About an Artwork
Course by Milica Tomić and Branimir Stojanović
July 16 – 21, 2018


Course description

“Discussion About an Artwork” will deal with the history and ramifications of the 2000 “Discussion about an Artwork” (DAA), organised in Belgrade by Milica Tomić and Branimir Stojanović. DAA was inspired by Tomić’s visit to Budapest in 2000 for an artist talk organised by artist collective “Little Warsaw” (Andras Galik and Balint Havas), which included a series of informal, non-institutional events in a residential building entrance hall in downtown Budapest. “Little Warsaw” invited artists to present and discuss their work in order to review and develop “informal and non-institutional thinking” on contemporary art production. Inspired by this model, DAA in Belgrade sought to produce a space for open, critical and engaged discussion by analysing art production, exhibiting politics and interpretation within the dominant socio-political, economic and ideological context of the end of the Yugoslav wars and the ideology of reconciliation in its neoliberal form. It questioned if the art scene in Serbia, which emerged within a non-official critical art framework, was able to continue within a system implicated in the production and perpetuation of war, violence and terror shaping the public sphere and reproducing dominant discourse; DAA closely looked at the ways this was reflected in the artwork itself. DAA soon turned into a collective endeavour in which different authors organised and developed the project further by following particular rules: one project, one discussion, no moderator and no documentation to let the project unfold in its own, unexpected way**.


Biographies

Milica Tomić is an artist and Head of the IZK-Institute for Contemporary Art (TU Graz). She is a founding member of the Yugoslav studies and art/theory group "Grupa Spomenik" [Monument Group, 2002] and she conceived and initiated the cross-disciplinary project Four Faces of Omarska [2010]. She has had exhibitions at House of World Cultures, Berlin; Whitney Museum of American Art; Kunsthalle Vienna; MUMOK Vienna; KIASMA Helsinki; Venice Biennale; Sydney Biennale; and International Istanbul Biennial, among other venues.

Branimir Stojanović (1958) lives and works in Belgrade. In his work situated between philosophy, psychoanalysis and art, he deals with practices of writing and conceptual political intervetions in a institutional philosophical contexts, art and psychoanalysis. He is the founder and a member of the self-educated platform, archive of Yugoslav humanisitic, Ignorant School master and his committees (2010-2015), member of the artsistc Monument Group (2004-2013), founder and lecturer in School for history and theory of art (1999-2003), member of Belgrade society of psychoanalysts (2002). Since 1980 he publishes texts and esyes for the fied of philosophy, theory of psychoanalysis,
criticism of ideology and theory of art.