Works by MIRJANA BOBA STOJADINOVIĆ spatial interventions, installations, projects CONTENTS ••• Artist statement ••• Biography SECTION 1 - storyplace 1. MIDWINTER DREAM OR REFRACTING THE WORLD, 2016 2. STORYPLACE, ˝2012 3. LIBRARY, object, 2012 4. URBAN METAMORPHOSES and INCISION, two exhibitions, 2011-2012 5. GUIDE THROUGH EXHIBITIONS AND CITIES, audio intervention in space, 2010 6. APARTMENT, month-long event, 2009 SECTION 2 - HEMA/HEMA 7. A HoLE IN THE WHOLE, installation, 2008 8. FROM FROM TO TO, object, 2012 9. FLAG, photograph-object-text, 2008-2011 SECTION 3 - earlier work 10. GALLERY and ENTRANCE, two exhibitions, 2005-2006 SECTION 4 - projects 11. ACTOPOLIS˝, 2015-2017 12. ARTIST AS AUDIENCE, forum and book, 2010-ongoing ••• CV ARTIST STATEMENT Shaped in a distabilized society, my works do not function within a pre-given or self-understood backdrop, but they propell questions on a miriad of relations. Through work I am interested in negotiating space and the ways it interacts with and enables BIOGRAPHY creative, social and political frequencies of everyday life; I use space as means of expression and intervention, often operating with non-gallery environments. I search for context Mirjana Boba Stojadinović (Belgrade, 1977) specificity, idiosincractic human experience of graduated and postgraduated at the Faculty of immediate surroundings and ways of shaping Visual Arts in Belgrade (2006). She also holds and sharing all aforementioned. a MFA Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (NL) in At a cross-section of different mediums, key collaboration with the University Plymouth (UK) agencies in my work incorporate photography, (2008). text, sound, voice and light and their sculptural qualities resourcing situations in space. I often Since 1998 she has exhibited solo in galleries in work with and for a limited number of audiences, Serbia, in Cetinje, Montenegro and in Zagreb. experimenting with ways an experience can be The focus of her interests is space and spatial shared, often in a form of participatory projects. relations. She has used various media including photography, text, sound and objects. Independent cultural production is something that interests me greatly – I run a non-profit She has also organized and participated in organization since 2005. numerous group exhibitions in the country and abroad, including Staatlische Kunsthalle Baden- Baden/DE; Klovićevi dvori, Zagreb/CRO; National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana/SI; Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade/SER; Palazzo Forti gallery of modern art, Verona/IT; Čačak/SER; TENT. Rotterdam/NL, etc. Boba is the recipient of the award of the 25th Memorial of Nadežda Petrović in 2010. In cooperation with other artists she initiated several projects dedicated to visual art in public and private spaces, as well as with artist run organizations. Since 2010 she is an author and organizer of the forum called ARTIST AS AN AUDIENCE. At the beginning of 2014 a book dedicated to the project was published. Most recently Boba curated the Belgrade edition of transnational project ACTOPOLIS. The project was a production by Goethe-Institut and Urbane Künste Ruhr. She lives and works in Belgrade. SECTION 1 storyplace The works in this section have been produced since 2009 till last year. They are focussed on performatively communicating the relation with and to the place one finds oneself in, always a city environment. They all touch upon the time- space relation. MIDWINTER DREAM or REFRACTING THE WORLD 25 points in the gallery where a sound-recorded narrative with sounds recorded by Boba from different places in Europe is confronted with different objects and imagery. All this is happening in almost complete darkness and the audience is aided with battery-lamps. Only two visi- tors at a time can listen to the narratives. 2016, Solo exhibition at Remont Gallery, Belgrade ”MIDWINTER DREAM or REFRACTING THE WORLD is a spatial installation – carefully constructed ambiance consisting of darkness and light, sound, text and objects. It is envisioned as a space of contemplation and re-creation. Mirjana Boba Stojadinović is an artist who is continually inspired by the subject of space and all that ”sediments” in it.” Marija Radoš The work works in the field of transmitting experiences through subtle interventions in the space of the gallery, but also in the mental space. In unlit environment you are invited to discover what is already there, but also to inscribe your desires and thoughts. Making unusual the experience of the present moment, the work is a conscience gesture to the public vulgarization of the personal experiences. By recognizing the difficult circumstances we live in for anything that is not purely survival, I make the effort to step into the darkness we are surrounded with and in it to glimpse signs of otherness. These pebbles (the audience could touch and play with everything they found in the gallery) are telling a story of Moon rocks brought from the Apolo mission to the Moon, found and lost, faked and stolen in many corners of the Earth; so much so that the one found in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam turned out to be fake. A graphite pencil sharpened on both ends was found on a bench in a park. A story of Villa Cerrini in Graz on top of Schlossberg says that the owners, a French general, never lived in the house. Reports say sometimes in the house one can hear a party, even though it is impossible (the house is isolated). Perhaps the ghost of the general came to live in the house after all. Perhaps the pencil decided to search for a hand that would write with it something brilliant. (after the exhibition we discovered drawings on the wall) Immortality is a belief that the soul, or some other centre of human consciousness, outlives the death and lives again in this or some other world. Initiational immortality is a passage in a state of overall sub-humanity, where the adept leaves the field of sensuous appearance in order to live in some secret area on the edge of the earth, freed from time and space limits. On the mantelpiece there were two porcelan vases, apparently old, white with blue ornaments. The ornaments were strangely blurred. She told me that they have been discovered aboard a ship that was bringing good from China to Holland in early XVII century. As the ship sank, the cold underwater currents and the duration on the bottom of the ocean didn’t break the vases, but did blur the enamel. STORYPLACE 2012, stories telling the reader in the public transport (tram No. 2) about the parts of the city where the transport passes through Part of the Blank Space exhibition at Mikser festival in Belgrade Storyplace is a spatial intervention working with itself in the tramway, they have no crossing points text in public space that moves – in a tramway. with commercials whatsoever – they don’t sell nor do The tramway moves, but it moves only on the they recommend anything: these texts are something beforehand traced lines, taking us to the nearest like thoughts in a motion. place that otherwise we can reach faster or slower Through Storyplaces one can trace different as pedestrians. spatial and narrative traces transformed into visual The steadiness and routines of the everyday, the performative stories shared among people who obligations and stressful time makes the time we inhabit the same city route spatially or only temporally. spend in-between two city points we almost never Following the string of stories through the streets one spend mentally in a space we actually occupy – on passes in a tramway, evoking Belgrade historical the street, in the transport, in a historical part of the memory, Storyplace reaches for the subjectivity of city, walking or driving above the streets of ancient the moment and the experience of own presence. Romans or the main European road to Istanbul, next Storyplace was installed in one tramway No. 2, to, in front of, behind, above... all that lead to having that circles the old part of Belgrade and produces a our reality as it is today. border today called the circle of No. 2, telling a story The texts, hand-applied to rice-paper, were in its own right. installed on places for printed commercials in a tramway. They are imperfect and besides the place this is not a poem. but it is something between you and me, not belonging to anyone. we slide on the planned route, between the lines and tramway cords between the river sava and river danube between the former kafana sibiria (in the early 20th century it used to be where zvezdara municipality is – so much outside the city, that whoever went to it went as if to sibiria... ) and the zoo between the Turkish, Serbian and Jewish part of the town down the street with most beauti- yard – today a fancy park bombing was physically felt in the ground of all parts of the city ful plane trees in the city right next to fišeklija – a place next to sebilj fountain at the bot- where gun-powder used to be to the railway station in place tom of skadarlija, which is a copy sold in cones (between the state of the pond venice as it used to of the fountain from sarajevo assembly and tašmajdan) be called because of sava river swamps that used to be there through palilula-named so be- towards the main square slavija – cause 200 years ago only here, former swamp with ducks savamala-a neighbourhood inhab- ited by serbs when kalemegdan in a village outside the city, a pipe next to the sundial that got stolen was allowed to be lit, while smok- used to be occupied by turks next to manjež – originally a ing “in the city” was forbidden