In Search of Balkania & History of Art for the Intelligence Community at Neue Galerie Graz

[anna balint]

[if someone had no chance to see the exhibition,
might look up the virtual catalogue at 
http://www.stmk.gv.at/verwaltung/lmj-ng/titel_e.html]

IN SEARCH OF BALKANIA

In Search of Balkania lifts a long overdue ban on the Balkans as a site of 
intellectual endeavor and cultural desire. Conceived from the outset as a curatorial 
operation and artistic experience against expectations, this exhibition confronts a 
subject full of contradictions, to which everyone brings baggage they can't easily 
drop. This exhibition requires that visitors check their baggage at the door, and 
allow the content of their own mental suitcases to be disturbed, questioned and de-
sensitized before thinking uncritically about their relation to Balkania again.

If on one level In Search of Balkania is a rendez-vous with a dented landscape full 
of used parts and accidental art, where the real still matters and storefront windows 
resemble surrealist displays, on another level it is a virtual encounter with a 
symbolic geography that will be the 21st century's most important fold: where East 
meets West, where Occident becomes Orient, and where none of the old lines and myths 
about identity, self, nation, and other hold. Indeed, if this exhibition presents a 
picture different from any picture previously shown in Europe of the Balkans, it is 
that there is nothing in Europe but the Balkans. Balkania is not a world unto itself, 
but a mirror onto all selves. To recognize the Balkans is to recognize features and 
syndromes out of which cities, wars, experiments, ideas and visions are composed.

How is such a world insinuated within the museum environment? Working with over sixty 
artists encountered during five years of close exchanges in the Balkans, the curators 
construct a matrix of Balkanic spaces and build a complex of metaphors derived not 
from the white cube of museum logic, but from the street collisions and market 
chances of Balkanic knowledge. Some rooms lead to a secret history of the avant-
garde, others to a phenomenology of the banal. From the bunkers of Enver Hoxha to the 
imaginary of the Black Sea, from religious kitsch to urban folklore, and from 
Croatian Conceptualism to Romanian Dadaism, this exhibition considers the Balkans as 
a source of culture without which the future of Europe is unimaginable.

The exhibition is accompanied by three publications: In Search of Balkania: A User's 
Manual; Balkanian: A Non-Standard Cultural Dictionary; Balkan as Metaphor: Between 
Globalization and Fragmentation.

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VUK COSIC
History of Art for the Intelligence Community

Neue Galerie, Spiegelsaal - October 27th bis November 24th 2002
Opening Times: Tue-Sun 10am - 6pm, Thu 10am - 8pm
Opening: Sat., October 26th 2002, 10:30 am

Cooperation: Medienturm Graz
Curator: Sandro Droschl


"History of Art for the Intelligence Community" is technically described as a front 
end for Carnivore, the project that mimics FBI's net surveillance software. The web 
usage data of the surveillance target is being displayed via well known masterpieces 
by Cezanne and Van Gogh and others so that the reading of the painting gives the 
trained operative a clear insight into the target's web activitie.

Vuk Cosic