On the Idiotic Work With the Idiotic People
Visual Arts



3/4 Fieldwork



Aleksa Bijelović, Milica Maksimović
On the Idiotic Work With the Idiotic People, 2015
(speculative action, installation)

Critics Have Chosen 2015
Art Gallery Nadežda Petrović, Gallery Risim, Čačak, Serbia


1/4 Accumulation





2/4 Appropriation

Flood lamps illuminate the clean, freshly prepared room. The windows are sealed with thick plastic sheets and on the table in the middle of the room.

Soon, you'll be packed into a few neatly wrapped Hefties and my own small corner of the world will be a neater, happier place. A better place.




4/4 Material production
The work is a series of interconnected actions — accumulation, appropriation, rendition, fieldwork, and site-specific spatial material production. The accumulation stage precedes all and feeds fieldwork, which then culminates in the documentation and installation process, a materialised rendition (memorial room) provoked by appropriation conveyed in parallel to the accumulation.

Hotel Morava in Čačak, Serbia, is the focus as a historical spot, a set of specific brief life affairs of interest following the general curatorial theme. It is a brief period of the life of an individual from which we source interest and borrow the title of the work, an anecdotal record of Leonid Šejka on the construction of Hotel Morava, an architect by education and trade, Šejka, the construction site manager.

Background

Critics Have Chosen is an exhibition held at the Fine Arts Gallery, Cultural Centre of Belgrade, since 1969. Art historians and fine arts critics present various aspects and contexts of contemporary fine arts production in Serbia at the beginning of each exhibition season. Since 2001, the format has evolved into an authorial exhibition curated by the winners of the Lazar Trifunović Award for fine arts criticism.

Jelena Stojanović, the 2013 Lazar Trifunović Award recipient, curates the Critics Has Chosen 2015 edition.

The Exhibition project starts from the work of theorist and artist Leonid Šejka (1932-70), whose practice moved artistic production outside the gallery, museum space, confirming the centrality of the urban experience as an inseparable part of everyday life. Consequently, in the research, the almost obsessive dedication to examining the material, materiality, as a kind of civilisational trace of DUMPSITE, WAREHOUSE, is of great importance.

According to many, art no longer exists, but that is why it is more present everywhere than ever, and the basic question is where it started from — to what extent is art, that is, not a part of everyday life? First of all, everyday urban experience? What is the relationship between art and the public? More precisely, does art have or should it have a social, political, cognitive role in today's control society?

— Excerpt from the curatorial statement 1

Creative Practice — Petokraka

In Belgrade, Serbia
and Perth, Western Australia

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