Exhibition MIG21

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Solo project at ERSTE Foundation

Series of 12 photographs Children of the (non)revolution
October 12 – November 05
Erste Campus, Vienna

Adela Jušić presents photographs which she took in Izmir during a two month research in May and June 2017. The pictures were taken in the old part of Izmir, accommodating a multicultural neighborhood. The photographs were taken in the premises of NGOs working with refugees, at the bazaar, in the streets.

Read more at ERSTE Website

 

Demanding the Impossible at Unexpected Turns

Opening
3 October, 19.00 – 21.00
4 – 27 October
Project curators: Gülsen Bal and Walter Seidl
With Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, VALIE EXPORT, Adela Jušić, Thaer Maarouf,
Cengiz Tekin
Open space
Venue: philomena+
a project room for collaborations between the MENA-region and Austria, Europe
Heinestraße 40, A- 1020 Vienna

In a world, where the impossible seems possible, when something that has been repressed for a long time, steps out of the unconscious and seems to get radicalised through the extreme right, artists are more than ever prompted to dedicate themselves to a future, where anti-intellectualism is at stake and critical thinking no longer accepted. What will come after Trump, Brexit and ISIS? Which forms of radicalisation are constituted and how has our perspective on a liberal, open society changed? How can artists reclaim this open society and which conflicts arise along economic, technological and medical progress, which makes us want to live longer but prevents us from thinking critically?
Artists are in constant need of demanding new models of gauging how the world can be seen from a different perspective than the one, which is determined, by dominant models of power, politics or religious beliefs. The latter often cause unexpected turns that shift societies into different directions, which might not even be accepted by a majority of voters and/or the population. Ever again, societies and certain population groups are trapped in a “state of exception”, as Giorgio Agamben put it in 2005. This state of exception, however, has continued to the present day and rather turned into a “state of emergency, which might not be overcome in a near future.
The artists whom are taking part in the exhibition tackle these questions implicitly and try to generate various models, which claim for a different status quo to open up new possibilities and areas of thought at the prelude to further urgent hopeless transformations and the voids that carry certain disappearances within unexpected turns.

She went to war, Adela Jušić, 2017, more info about the work HERE

Women and “labour of love” after WWII in Yugoslavia

24.09. at 19h, Markhof, Markhofgasse 19, Vienna
Wienwoche, Manifesto of Ideal Work
Link to Wienwoche website

Discussion and presentation

Artist and activist Adela Jušić will speak about exploitation of women through reproductive work and housework in the period after the World War II in Yugoslavia, when women gained most of their political and social rights, and economic rights for the first time in Yugoslavia. With the start of World War II in Yugoslavia, women entered a public sphere massively, through their large participation in the Antifascist struggle, both on the war field, and through the work of Antifascist Front of Women, one of the largest women’s organization in Europe at the time. After the war, they massively entered a labor market, and did voluntary work on reconstruction of the state destroyed by war and construction of  new Socialist state that was about to be industrialized and modernized. What were the main concerns of women workers at the time, and  how were women double exploited as reproductive workers and housewives at the same time mostly working in lowest paid jobs? Adela Jušić will give some answers to these questions relying mostly on the documents of Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and trace the historical connection between women workers position (including reproductive work and  housework) right after WWII, and today, after the Yugoslav wars.

Artist will also present the Online archive of Antifascist struggle of women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, a project of Association for Culture and Art Crvena, on which she works together with Andreja Dugandžić since several years, as well as her art works related to the subject.

Adela Jušić is currently  at Artist in Residence program, in collaboration with frei_raum Q21 exhibition space, and working on an exhibition “Stopover – Ways of Temporary Exchange “, curated by Judit Angel, Christiane Erharter, Michaela Geboltsberger, Dora Hegyi,  Heide Wihrheim, opening on September 21st at the frei_raum Q21 exhibition space, and part of the exhibition in Erste Foundation opening also on September 21st.

Adela Jušić was born on 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she lives and works. Jušić graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Printmaking, University of Sarajevo in 2007 (MA), and holds MA in Democracy and Human Rights in South East Europe from Sarajevo and Bologna Universities, 2013. She is a co-founder and working at cultural projects at the Association for Culture and Art Crvena since 2010. Jušić has exhibited in more than 100 international exhibitions including Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Balkan Inisght, Pompidou Center, Paris etc. She has participated in several artists in residence programes ( ISCP, New York; Kulturkontakt, Vienna; i.a.a.b. Basel). She won Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist in 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price CEE in 2011, and Special award of Belgrade October Salon in 2013.

Exhibition “Stopover – Ways of Temporary Exchange”

2017 September 21- November 25
Curated by Judit Angel, Christiane Erharter, Michaela Geboltsberger, Dora Hegyi,  Heide Wihrheim
frei_raum Q21 exhibition space
Museums Quartier, Vienna, Austria

Link to FB event

Almost 30 years after the fall of the “Iron Curtain” Vienna still is described problematically as a gateway between “East” and “West”. This controversy has on the one had to do with the history of Austria. On the other hand Austria’s role as a neutral country of the “West” and receiver of Gastarbeiter in the 1960s and 1970s adds to this. Especially post-1989 Vienna was a host for artists and scholars from the neighboring countries and thereby continues this long history of cultural exchange.

Participants: Abandoned (re)creation, Zbyněk Baladrán, Igor and Ivan Buharov, Aleš Čermák, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Cristina David, Ricarda Denzer, Katalin Erdődi, ex-artists’ collective, Ferenc Gróf, Gruppo Tökmag, Márton Gulyás, Oto Hudec, Adela Jušić, Lenka Kukurová, Ioana Nemeş, Polygon Creative Empire, Isa Rosenberger, Alina Şerban, Tereza Stejskalová, Kamen Stoyanov, Johanna Tinzl & Stefan Flunger, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Raluca Voinea, Hannes Zebedin.

Curated by Judit Angel, Michaela Geboltsberger, Dóra Hegyi for tranzit;
Christiane Erharter, Heide Wihrheim for ERSTE Foundation.

A co-operation between tranzit and ERSTE Foundation with frei_raum Q21.

 

 

 

 

Sarajevo – Zurich Unlimited

Jelena Petrović – Breaches of Parallel Realities

Geopolitics of the unlimitedconnects incompatible spaces wherein different realities simultaneously operate, in this case the cities of Zurich and Sarajevo. The exhibition Zurich – Sarajevo Unlimited evokes the novel The City & the City by China Miéville, a British author of socialist dystopian science fiction. It tells the story of two imaginary cities, Besźel and UlQoma, which exist side by side, within one another, and perhaps most accurately without one another. The citizens of both cities have been taught to ignore, not see and not to co-exist with each other. There is a clear rule of Unseeing, and failure to comply with this rule is called a Breach, while a police organisation sanctions such transgressions and reports them to the superordinate Oversight Committee, that is, to the authorities. In the video work based on the novel, made by two artists, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, together with China Miéville, this committee for preservation of mutual invisibility, that is of the unavoidable invisible borders of the new democracies, is called a state within the state, shadow government, or deep state (after the Turkish term DerinDevlet). Deep state occurs as a supervisory authority, in which the elected representatives of both cities actually coexist in their positions of power with the sole purpose to define the past, sanction the present (so-called breaches, or interruptions of reality) and create the future. The City and the City thus remain invisible to one another in their daily existence, not physically, but rather psychologically, through the power of free choice and established morals which make any breach be defined as a transgression, or a crime. Mutual invisibility of the cities thus prevents social, historical, material, or any other coexistence. Furthermore, it testifies to the impossibility of the common, impossibility of the unlimited, which is essentially evidenced by any attempt to breach borders, or to abolish entrenched geopolitical realities, both in everyday life and in art.

The artists, whose works deal with geopolitical (in)visibility, memory and social, mutually conditioned individual and collective trauma, ruthless drawings and erasures of borders, the war and the dystopian future ensuing after the most recent war, thus create a social space in which Sarajevo becomes a shared city. This is the location of the search for the politics of hope, for the sanctuary of friendship and community, for the poetry in the wake of the war, i.e. as phrased by Marx, poetry from the future in which some new social revolution needs to win over its ravaged past[1].The historiography of such past is still entrapped in institutional systematisations of historical knowledge,and is produced today from the positions of power based on the neoliberal structure of post-transitional changes. Subjugated knowledge resurfaces as the politics of error, a counter-historical trigger, and calls for the defence of the society which, following the war and the so-called transition, has ended on the global periphery[2]. Accordingly, the exhibited works which commonly address the city of Sarajevo use different strategies to investigate liminal spaces, their boundaries and assigned geopolitical borders, in the confines of which war by all means and war by other means are alternately being led[3].

In her video work entitled Geometry of Time, Lana Čmajčaninuses geopolitical factography: the choice of 32 geographical maps which evidence the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the previous 551 years. The maps which succeed and overlap one another, instead of evidencing precise and clear borders, in fact demonstrate their ebb and flow, the inconsistency and instability arising from colonial, imperial, expansionist, migratory, wartime, but also “peace-making” efforts and revisions. The grey areas of separation are revealed through the artistic strategies of opposing the great historical narratives, and they indicate the necessity of our permanent fight against what instrumentalises, controls, shapes or quite clearly oppresses and socially exploits us, leaving behind its visible marks.

On the other hand, the historiography of (dis)continuous resistance and struggle is figuratively presented by DženanHadžihasanović in his series of paintings Blank Title, mapping the mass movements which caused emancipatory shifts in society throughout history. An open sum of individual scenes from the past to which we refer when we talk about mass social movements serves to compose a single picture, structurally open to future inscriptions of revolutionary narratives. White banners, simplified human forms, blank faces, they all testify to the instability of the battles won, emptied out emancipatory politics, the inability to claim victories in the devastation of the present moment, in other words, to the faultiness of talking about revolution, unless this revolution is permanent. Therefore in his new series of paintings entitled Moving Back, Hadžihasanovićopens the chasm of inversion, painting people in queues, people on the move, migrating people. Forced and violent mass movements in society breach into prior images of the victorious past, confirming both the instability of the victories won and the necessity of permanent struggle.

The series of photographs entitled Nostalgia by Adela Jušić and Lost Things by Jim Marshall introduceinto the preconfigured historical map a social forensics of blurred individual and collective relationships with their constant shifts and violent displacements caused by war, and their impossible politics of memory. Both these works follow and document the objects lost in the course of wars: the former tells the story of the things abandoned in the war zone, possessions left in a 1990’s Sarajevo apartment after the family had gone into refuge, while the latter traces the objects abandoned and lost along the Balkan route of the present mass migrations. (In)visible objects, bodies, spaces depicted in the photographs and their mutual relations become in themselves witnesses of the events that produced them, creating the space for forum, the locus of discussion following material evidence. What follows in this forum is material rhetoric, forensicsin its original meaning: the space in which the truth about an event is built upon the object which simultaneously represents an outcome of the conflict and negotiation of its meaning. On the one hand,Adela Jušićexhibits personal belongings of a Sarajevo family to testify to thenostalgia which appearsas a particularist colonisation of politics and history; and on the other,Jim Marshallleaves the photographs of objects as forensic records of our everyday existence. Objects from both artworks emerge as a locus of political articulation of time and space within the global cartography of the permanent war.

The artwork of JusufHadžifejzovićshows different kind of things, countless and different objects such as empty bottle, wrapping materials and similar, which be can summarised in the words by Peter Brook – All begins and ends in emptiness.[4]They are in fact the substrate of our emptied out reality, the parodist images of the neoliberal social economies. With its massive nothingness, this dystopian materialism serves to camouflage the images of the bygone war, and finally comes to break the deadlock through parody and humour, utilising them as artistic strategies of political struggle and everyday survival. The vacuity of the objects and their images reveals the essence, the initial spark of overcoming the very same fear which, in the performance entitled The Fear of Drinking Water, highlights the value of human relationships, as well as the changes in social life conditioned by the deflating economy of the war which perpetuates.

This forensic intersection of cartography, historiography and their objects, at the place where every BREACH of borders is a matter of personal and social responsibility, contains common ground wherein a politics of hope can be articulated. This is the politics of hope which resides in the distorted geopolitical zones suspended between utopian and dystopian future, not unlike the one informing the work of BojanStojčić and its poetic sights of everyday situations and landscapes. The title of his work: No Trace promises the Pathmaybe is the best way to conclude that the society in which we live, with its borders and politics, actually depends on us, on our transgressions and inscribed messages. What disables us to be ready – to mine for the poetry from the future, massively and permanently – is alienation: the moment from the City and City in which we decide to accept the rule of Unseeing.

Translated by Milan Marković and TijanaParezanović

[1] Cf. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, https://www.marxist.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (last viewed on 2 March, 2017).

[2] Cf. Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. St. Martin’s Press. 2003.

[3] Inversion of the thesis made by Clausewitz of “War as politics by other means“, to suggest that politics is in fact continuation of war by other means.

[4]Taken from the artist statement of Jusuf Hadžifejzović.

Exhibition Contemporary Refresh#2

August 09-20
Gallery Brodac, Sarajevo

*TELLALL is a Magazine-Laboratory; a critical and experimental exhibi-tion space „on paper“ edited in Sarajevo. An international think-tank which aims to conduct independent research and serve as a meeting space for artists, poli-cy-makers, activists, and intellectuals to share ideas with an art project-oriented attitude that goes beyond the localism/globalism par-adigm. TELLALL focuses on recent events on a monthly basis, putting in focus people and places of high symbolic content in order to constitute a unique space for the discus-sion of art and culture-related topics within the whole Balkans region. Its aim is also to deelitize the access to art and bring it in direct contact with all kinds of audiences.In this light, the first edition is titled “The museum is closed” and will present selected works and interventions related to this topic by local artists; interviews on the status of the museum, its history and educational role, its function of preserving a past, the promotion of the fundamental, irreplaceable aspects of a living culture, and the opportunity for direct contact between the public and the living arts. By doing this, it will also provide an insight into the city of Sarajevo with its new ferment and political change marked by the art scene

Klabika [Residency] 2K17
is a programme that provides audio curatorship & sound manifestos for environments with strong attitude and bold presence where creative industry meets tendencies for tomorrow.

Link to FB event

Exhibition “Kupujmo domaće”

Link to FB event

Publication “Sarajevo – l*a*tribu*t de l’art”

“Sarajevo – l*a*tribu*t de l’art”, edited by Pierre Courtin, Pierre-Philippe Freymond & Christophe Solioz presents a set of 19 exclusive interviews of Sarajevo-based artists belonging to different generations: Edo Numankadic, Nardina Zubanović, Emina Kujundžić, Edin Zubčević, Almir Kurt, Daniel Premec, Nela Hasanbegović, Asim Ðelilović, Gordana Anđelić-Galić, Adela Jušić, Pierre Courtin, Nenad Dizdarević, Danis Tanović, Damir Imamović, Aleksandra Nina Knežević, Mak Hubjer, Paul Lowe, Dante Buu, Andrej Ðerković.

The interviews were realized in Sarajevo by students from the “Collège de Genève” during their “Art Study Trip” which took place end of March 2017 in the framework of the “Philosophy of the City” lecture given by their philosophy professor Christophe Solioz.

This project was done in partnership with the Gallery Duplex 100 m2 (Sarajevo).

This 160 pages strong art book is published by Riveneuve Editions (Paris) and Duplex 100m2 (Sarajevo) and printed in Sarajevo by Amos Graf. The layout is done by Aleksandra Nina Knežević.

BONA – časopis za feminističku teoriju i umjetnost

Drugi broj, juli 2017
Intervju radila Tea Hadžiristić

“Ideja osobnog osnaživanja i subjektiviranja na kojoj je počivala kampanja za opismenjavanjem žena i izlazak na izbore, a kasnije i projekt društvene integracije, ustuknula je pred partijskom retorikom radne borbenosti  (…) Ideja kako će povećani broj radnih sati, te natjecateljski duh riješiti sve probleme nagle industrijalizacije  zaostale poljoprivrede ponekad je graničila s apsurdom: [Mljekarice će] postati… borci za veći prinos mlijeka i u toj će borbi nastojati da pribave kravi što više hrane, tj. da uzgoje što više krmnog bilja, da zasijavaju livade, kako bi dobile više sijena (…) naše će žene uspjeti da uzgoje takve krave, koje će dati i do 16.000 litara mlijeka godišnje.” (Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Žene u formativnom socijalizmu)

Žene Jugoslavije su u do tad najvećem broju ušle na tržište rada u nove fabrike nove Jugoslavije. Trend povlačenja žena iz javne sfere  počinje 1950. ih, te se kao glavni uzrok ovome navodi uvođenje dječijeg dodatka, radi kojeg žene postaju demotivisane za rad u privredi. Bilo je nekih pokušaja podruštvljavanja poslova koji se obavljaju u domaćinstvu, te je  krajem pedesetih godina bilo sve više uslužnih servisa, Ipak, ove usluge koristio je mali broj žena. Osnivani su i restorani društvene ishrane,ali su njih uglavnom koristili muškarci samci.  Donesena je uredba da fabrike i ustanove koje zapošljavaju više od 20 žena majki imaju dužnost osnovati dječije jaslice i vrtić, ali se ova uredba nije poštovala. Dvostruka opterećenost žena radnica i majki bila je jedna od tema Titovog govora 1950. na Trećem kongresu AFŽa Jugoslavije, gdje on govori o ženi koja se trga na dvije strane,  “jer ne bi željela da izgubi obraz napredne žene Jugoslavije, a istovremeno ne bi htjela da njena djeca stradaju ili se unesreće kod kuće.”  Ovaj govor nam potvrđuje kako je vladalo vjerovanje da brigu o djeci treba da vodi i dalje samo žena, čak i ako je zaposlena. Kampanje koje je vodio AFŽ o društvenoj ulozi jugoslovenske žene bile su nažalost upućene samo ženama, ne i muškarcima i to je bila greška, ista ona koja je napravljena i kada su vođene kampanje za skidanje zara. (Žene su radi skidanja zara osjećale stid pred muškim pogledima. Radi tih osuda one su se osjećale ogoljeno i poniženo, te je shodno tome kampanje o osvještavanju trebalo kreirati i za muškarce, podjednako kao i za žene.)

U oblasti proizvodnje žene su najviše zapošljavane u tekstilnoj i kožnoj industriji, naime najmanje plaćenoj. One su dalje najprisutnije u oblasti obrazovanja, socijalne zaštite, zdravstva i ugostiteljstva, dakle, na onim poslovima koji su se smatrali logičnim produžetkom njihovog rada u kući, tzv, “ženskim poslovima”, radom ljubavi. Na rukovodećim poslovima bilo ih je jako malo. Dugo su čekale na unaprijeđenja ukoliko su ona bila moguća. Lični dohodak žene u prosjeku je bio niži od ličnog dohodka muškarca sa odgovarajućom stručnom spremom. Dakle radilo se o različitim oblicima diskriminacije žena na tržištu rada. „Nepisano je pravilo da se čak i u radnim organizacijama sa velikom većinom ženske radne snage na rukovodećim mestima nalaze muškarci”, kaže Slobodanka Nedović u svom istraživanju.

Link na online verziju časopisa