“Joint Exhibition of Young Visual Artists Award Winners”

Since its inception in 1990 by the former Czechoslovakia, the Young Visual Arts Award has expanded its boundaries, and it’s now organized by ten central- and southeastern-European countries. The third edition of this group show, which unites works by the winners of each national prize, reflects much of the post-Communist political change within the region. Barbora Klímová presents Replaced-Brno-2006, an installation in line with the neo-avant-garde undertakings that characterize many young artists’ practices. Klímová reenacts five historical public-space performances, including Jiri Kovanda’s notorious An Attempt at Meeting a Girl, 1977. On five monitors placed throughout the gallery, the old-style footage of Klimová’s actions alongside interviews conducted with the original pieces’ authors links past and present in an intellectually challenging project. Katarina Zdjelar’s Don’t Do It Wrong, 2007, is a video based on amateur-style footage of a daily morning ritual in Turkey’s primary schools. Orchestrated by their teacher, students praise the nation’s founding president, Atatürk, an exercise that is interrupted when a girl begins crying after a boy fails to hold the Turkish flag correctly. Pointing out the power of educational institutions in the formation of the individual, Zdjelar examines the relation between the state’s ideological apparatus and the construction of ethnic identity. In a city still marked by destroyed buildings following NATO’s 1999 air bombings, the 1990s civil war in the former Yugoslavia unsurprisingly emerges as significant subject matter throughout the exhibition. Mladen Miljanovic’s output mixes his personal impression of the conflict with media-propagated pictures of the army. In My Shiny Disco War, 2008, colorful images of soldiers and various weaponry are projected onto a disco ball and reflected throughout the darkened space, to a sound track of gunshots and explosions. Evoking the memories of the clash through the language of psychedelia, with its connotations of a youth ethos, Miljanovic breaks down the boundaries of subjectivity and collective unconscious. Escaping the label of the Exotic Other applied by some globe-trotting curators in past decades, the works on view respond to local issues, as seen through the sensitive eyes of globally connected artists.