Artists: Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Caner Aslan, Maja Bajević, Blue Noses, Veronica Brovall, Bunker Research Group, Petr Bystrov, Braco Dimitrijević, Jim Finn, Lana Čmajčanin, Igor Grubić,  Tina Gverović & Siniša Ilić, Allard Van Der Hoek, Vlatka Horvat & Tim Etchells, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Villu Jaanisoo, Bojan Jovanović & Smilja Ignjatović, Šejla Kamerić, Karsten Konrad,  Marko Lulić, Basim Magdy, David Maljković, Radenko Milak, Mladen Miljanović, Museum Of American Art (Berlin), Ioana Nemes, Ahmet Öğüt, Milija Pavićević, Marko Peljhan, Ivan Petrović, Tobias Putrih, Lisi Raskin, Lala Raščić, Römer + Römer, Erzen Shkololli, Group Spomenik, Alma Suljević, Sz. Berlin, Nebojša Šerić Shoba, Škart, Wolfgang Thaler, Dragoljub Raša Todosijević, Jelena Tomašević, Alma Suljević, Natalija Vujošević, Xyz (Matej Gavula & Milan Tittel) 

The Atomic War Command in the Bosnian town of Konjic was the largest underground facility ever built in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and one of the most massive construction projects in its history. Dedicated to sheltering the Yugoslav Army headquarters along with 350 selected men and women in the event of nuclear war, this space was built over a period of almost three decades (from 1950s to 1970s) and cost billions of dollars. Today the ARK has all the characteristics of a failed Cold War investment. The nuclear catastrophe it was meant to survive never occurred and the state which had systematically worked to defend itself in case of such a disaster, dissolved in a conventional war fought with far less technologically advanced means.

The historical lesson is unambiguous. Nonetheless, it should not be approached with cold cynicism as a symbol of a failed political project. Today the bunker in Konjic is gradually becoming a time machine that inspires us to travel as much into the past as into the future. This journey is initiated and mediated by innovative practices of contemporary art, in the form of some inquiries into implications and consequences this unique place, and its historical tale.

The ARK can be stirred, analyzed and actualized through various artistic interventions by creating different nodes of ambiguous meanings where space and time meet, both sensually and politically. The bunker was a place to provide shelter and sustenance for a limited number of people during a brief period of time during a potential catastrophe. The exhibition could therefore become a "simulation of life" in restricted circumstances of the notion of pure "survival", with all its accompanying political and psychological (personal/intimate) experiences and insights. While the invited artists will be asked to base their work contextually, they will also be asked to freely broaden this context to include contemporary implications that can trigger the relevant questions that we ask ourselves about the future of the entire planet.

In the field of contemporary culture and media, the issues raised by this location and this project are reflected in the dominant "pre-apocalyptic" mood: climate change, environmental pollution, rapid depletion of natural energy resources, dispersion of the nuclear arsenal (with the possibility that not only states but also powerful individuals may possess the capacity to develop and launch such weapons), drastic increase in population with resultant poverty, an expanding "third world" in a global "post-industrial" economic and political system, aggressive privatization of public goods - including "universal knowledge" itself, repressive political dictatorships and growing fundamentalist religious fanaticism announcing the upcoming "end of the world", etc...

The first edition of the Biennial will be realized under the title NO NETWORK. The title came out of a simple observation: the bunker is a secluded and isolated space preventing us to use the contemporary means of individual communication, such are the mobile phones which inform us that there is "no network connection" available there. In such a physical and psychical isolation, this space becomes rather a space of anxious reflection then a space of some unflappable communication. This does not imply that an exhibition as such is not crucially a form of communication between artists, their works and the space itself - but by stressing the ability of art to generate knowledge end emotions mutually reflecting each other, we would like to counter the omnipresence of the rhetoric of "networking" as very often devoid of concentrated solitude of subjectivity from which artistic endeavor transpires. However, artists invited to participate in the project will primarily be those whose work is concerned with different aspects of "artistic research" and other "non-disciplinary" modes of production of inter-subjectivity in the field of contemporary experience which is otherwise increasingly getting emptied of forms of reflexive communication in a "common language". 

Curated by Branislav Dimitrijević

Photos of the Biennale

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