Who is Marko Marković?Marko Marković (HR)

Dom omladine (Belgrade)

performance, 2016

The name and surname of Marko Marković are used in this work as synonym for certain actions, events or situations. Just as the name John Doe as a rule indicates an unidentified person, we can also consider this example either a real or a fictitious person. Marko Marković took the identity of his namesake Marko Marković and went off to Moscow International Biennale for Young Art instead of him. In the context of culture crime, Marko Marković positions his experience of exchange of identity in the area of the world of art – a marketing machine that crushes everything in front of it, where the author is a dead letter or just one name in a series.

In spring 2016, Marko Marković received an email from the curator of the Moscow Biennial of Young Art explaining that she was writing to him at the recommendation of a gallerist in Belgrade who knew his works and invited him to the exhibition. The curator, in fact, had erroneously addressed Marko Marković, an artist in Croatia, thinking she was addressing Marko Marković, an artist from Serbia. At this time, Marko Marković took on the role of the other Marko Marković and, representing himself as the other, agreed to take part in the Biennial.

During the whole of the process, Marko Marković found himself in interesting situations, in which by digital processing he manipulated documents, communicated with the institutional administration and bodies of the administration, visited features of interest and created events which passed out of performative practice over into the real spatial and temporal environment in interaction with people who wondered who Marko Marković was.

The work was created in 2016 as part of Moscow International Biennale for Young Art: Ruins of identity / we didn’t know.

anti-author: Marko Marković (HR)
anti-author: Marko Marković (RS)
curator: Ekaterina Granova (RU)
participant: Olga Matvejeva (RU)
participant: Sandro Đukić (HR)

Marko Marković (HR)

Marko Marković is an artistic researcher on collective engagement in self-organized societies creating autonomous models of coexistence with performative communication strategies. He graduated from the Arts Academy in Split, University of Zadar (Psychology and Pedagogy), and holds an MA in Art & Science from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the department where he worked as a program coordinator. From 2008 to 2018, he was the artistic director of DOPUST / Days of open performance. He was awarded the Radoslav Putar Young Visual Artist Award in 2011. From 2012 to 2014, he worked in the production of the Matthew Barney Studio in New York. Marković presented his work at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2016, La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Sessions Giardini in 2019, the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in 2016, at Kunsthalle Wien in 2023. As a project researcher in the scientific team at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz in 2022/2023, he is exploring robot-human interactions.