An original exhibition of Simona Ognjanović and Stevan Vuković entitled Before the Court was held in the Nadežda Petrović Art Gallery in Čačak from September 24 to November 1, 2016. In the division of roles that they took at this exhibition, the artists appeared as forensic experts, detectives, witnesses, accused people and prosecutors, or inciters who before the court of the public brought out cases of the abuse of positions of status in the area of arts. The exhibition covered works that directly take up questions of judicial practice, then those in the performance of which some of the standard investigative or forensic procedures are used, as works in which the agonism of the courtroom is dominant, or in which the will for judging, assessing and evaluating is manifested. Thus the range is from those that have with their actions caused the launching of a criminal procedure by the public prosecutor, to those that have only in an illustrative manner represented the procedures of making decisions about representative forms of artistic work and the hierarchy of positions on the scene.
Part of the exhibition is a unit called The Artist in Conflict with the Law, which partially overlaps with the thematic framework of Extravagant Bodies: Crime and Punishment. It brings together the works of artists against whom legal proceedings have been mounted on account of their artistic interventions. At the presentation of the exhibition, the curators present through documentation, videos and photographs its thematic and spatial organisation, with detailed references to individual works.
producer: Nadežda Petrović Art Museum, Čačak
exhibition set-up: Milorad Mladenović
visual identity: Škart
artists: Ivan Faktor (HR), Rosella Biscotti (IT), Miša Savić i Dragomir Nikolić Čeda (RS), Frank Uwe Laysiepen Ulay (NL), Michael Benson (US), UBERMOGREN (CH/AT), Novi kolektivizam (SL), Tanja Ostojić i David Rych (SR/DE), Gulf Labor: Gregory Sholette & Matt Greco (US), Umetnička koalicija Gulf Labor: Doris Bittar (US/LB), No one is illegal: Florian Scheidner (NO), Santiago Sierra (ES), Jasmina Cibic (SL), Hila Peleg (DE), Jelica Radovanović & Dejan Anđelković (RS), Tea Tupajić (HR), Bojan Đorđev (RS).