PODROOM Gallery, CULTURAL CENTRE OF BELGRADE
Opening: Thursday, August 2 at 20.00
2 – 25. 8. 2018.
The exhibition Personal Geographies includes works by seven international artists: Ana Hoffner, Angela Melitopoulos, Angelika Levi, Lana Čmajčanin, Teresa Mulet, Virginia Villaplana and Yara Haskiel. Through fragmented micro-histories and ancestry-related issues of memory and forgetting, these artists are searching for the ways to confront traces of the past inscribed in landscapes, minds and bodies. From south and east of Europe to South America and vice versa, the intention is to rethink territories as simultaneously geographic and affective, as sceneries for embodied processes of transmission of memory.
Visual essays and installations address the topics of displacement and migration, violence, wars and transgenerational trauma. They introduce anachronisms, different temporalities and gaps rather than working with comprehensive and closed accounts.The moving image is the main medium through which these artists tend to counteract dominant historical and political narratives. The exhibition includes video and film essays (Angela Melitopoulos, Angelika Levi, Yara Haskiel), video-installations (Ana Hoffner, Lana Čmajčanin), documentary video interview and video document within broader multidisciplinary projects (Teresa Mulet,Virginia Villaplana). Of crucial importance is a relation between visual, written, oral and performative models of testimony in the form of monologues, dialogues, gestures, poetry or melodies. The underlying idea of Personal Geographies is to look for another ways of telling history beyond categories of identity and territory. The focus is upon the strategies of survival and the places of pain that are at the same time places of resistance, hope, empathy, solidarity and utopian imagination.
The exhibition is part of a broader project born out of friendship whose authors are Branka Vujanović, art historian from Sarajevo, and Yara Haskiel, visual artist from Berlin. The project is concerned with political, social, cultural and family frameworks of remembering as well as with dispositives of representation through which moving images meet their public. An exhibition within a gallery setting is one of these dispositives. The other will be a film program within a cinema setting, which is planned for 2019 and will be curated by Angelika Levi, filmmaker from Berlin, and Borjana Gaković, film and media scholar from Sarajevo, based in Berlin.
The program within the exhibition includes books presentations and conversations with artists. Ana Hoffner’s book The Queerness of Memory, published by b_books from Berlin, will be presented on Thursday, August 2, at 18.30h. The book as an artistic object Informe 1999-2016 by Venezuelan artist Teresa Mulet will be presented on Friday, August 3, at 18.30h. The conversation with Angelika Levi, Lana Čmajčanin and Yara Haskiel will take place on Friday, August 3, at 19h.
Supported by: Belgrade Cultural Center, City of Belgrade, ifa-Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, European Cultural Foundation-STEP, Compagnia di San Paolo, Austrian Cultural Forum Belgrade, Institut Cervantes Beograd, Hamaca-Moving Image Platform.
For further information visit: www.personalgeographies.net
Program:
Thursday, August 2, 18.30
Book presentation
Ana Hoffner: The Queerness of Memory
Friday, August 3, 18.30
Book presentation
Teresa Mulet: Informe 1999-2016
Friday, August 3, 19.00
Conversation with artists: Angelika Levi, Lana Čmajčanin, Yara Haskiel
Moderators: Branka Vujanović i Borjana Gaković
Cover photo: Angelika Levi, My Life Part 2, 2003, film essay, 90′