Exhibition Before the CourtSimona Ognjanović (RS), Stevan Vuković (RS)

izložba, 2016

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).

Simona Ognjanović (RS)

Simona Ognjanović is an art historian and the author of numerous texts about contemporary art published as prefaces to catalogues and articles in printed and electronic media. She is author of the exhibition Canvas of Concrete and co-creator of the exhibitions Two are better than one and Intera(tra)ction. In the National Museum in Belgrade she put on the exhibition Piet Mondrian, the Case of Composition II, for which, with co-creator Jelena Dergenc, she won the prize of the Serbian Art Historians Association for the best exhibition of 2014.

sognjanovic@hotmail.com

Stevan Vuković (RS)

Stevan Vuković, philosopher and art theorist has published texts about contemporary visual art ever since 1992, and has been a member of the board of a dozen specialised Serbian and foreign journals. Since 1996 he has worked as a curator. He has put on over fifty exhibitions that he has devised or co-created, as well as other original projects with contemporary fine artists in European and world institutional premises as well as in Serbia. Currently he is running the programme of presentations of video works at Filmforum in SKC Belgrade.

stevanvukovic@yahoo.com