FLU Beograd / How to Succeed in Life
Group exhibition
Guest group exhibition of works by students of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
How Will the Wolf Survive?
(Los Lobos album title, 1984. Year)
The works are visually different. Perhaps, at first glance, the interconnections are not visible enough. Nevertheless, the common features that these works emit can be singled out. In a very direct and critically argued way, the role of art education systems is considered.
As well as the positions of "material" and lecturers, but also the position of art in society, within contemporary culture. These are the traumatic points of inertial systems. These open questions raise a number of other important questions.
Traditionally understood visual poetics, anachronistic post-modernist standards, are also questioned, through a legitimate demand for redefinition or consideration. There is a clear need for inclusion, incorporation of the text into the body of the works. However, in a completely different way from the historical model of conceptual practice, distant from the contemporary moment.
The medium of drawing is the central point, but it is not the final outcome. The transmedia and intermedia experimental states of the exhibited works directly form the social context as a field of artistic activity. In this environment, both the artist and the drawing as a medium are the Wolf that must survive. How?
NFS (video game Need for speed 1994 – )
Modern technologies have made it possible for the world in which we live to be "accelerated" to incredible proportions. The medium of pen and paper is "clean" and "fast", similar to the speed of the legitimate desire for success and realization) in art. (As in any other profession). General hyper-connectivity becomes the equivalent of pseudo-alienation. Omnipresent and instantaneous availability is equivalent to hyper-isolation. This leads to a reactive action in relation to the speed of time. Works on paper, (drawings, watercolors, collages) receive a large amount of manual labor in a longer time interval.
Acting within the media is the Body, more than the "hand" or "head" in the bipolar system. On one pole is the Body in the complicated socio-political totalitarian system of culture. At the same time, on the other pole, the same Body is in conjunction with the digital technological environment of the constant availability of each individual and the software matrix of marketing.
Keywords, freedom of speech, sexuality, drama, humor become soft and distant. Emotional modules are placed in a cluster that grows into a burden of anxiety, pressure, anxiety, indifference...
As Nataša Kokić thinks in the text of the exhibition of student drawings "Being Present", held in Belgrade in 2021 in the Cvijeta Zuzorić Pavilion:
"The renewed drawing enthusiasm can also be seen as a kind of low-fi moment, where we witness the process of creating a work, with all its mistakes, whether they are intentional or not. Drawing as a medium enables the recording of noises and signals from our environment, creates a direct connection between the senses of the artist and the one represented on paper – in fact, it makes the shortest path from the physical to the semantic. The connection with language does not end here – not only does it contain elements of syntax, but it also resembles speech in itself. Immediacy, flow in production, closeness to the material and its simplicity (pen and paper) – all this makes drawing gain importance."
Belgrade, March 2022
Zoran Dimovski
The exhibition at the Šira Gallery can be viewed during the Gallery's working hours (Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., 6 p.m. – 8 p.m., Saturdays: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) until May 2, 2022.
The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb.
