That Passes Between Us
12 May 2012 - 03 June 2012
Good Children Gallery
New Orleans, USA
Artists: Lana Čmajčanin, Jim Finn, Ivan Grubanov, Sophie Lvoff, Maha Maamoun, Marko Peljhan, Ahment Öğüt and Nebojša Šerić Shoba
Since it's completion in 1979, D-0 ARK (acronym stands for 'atomska ratna komanda' - atomic war command) was one of the largest underground facilities built in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to protect up to 350 individuals in the case of nuclear warfare. Buried deep in the side of a mountain in the town of Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, it has been kept untouched and functioning. Last year the bunker opened its doors to the public in an event that was announced as the first biennial of Contemporary Art in Bosnia and Herzegovina: D-0 ARK Underground 'No Network'.
'That Passes Between Us' revisits this ambitious curatorial project selecting some of the work exhibited in Konjic, expanding with projects that deal with reality and past of Bosnia and Herzegovina and bringing them into a dialogue with works that share mutual concerns of exploring a contemporaneity braced over the triple edge of failed political projects, utopian fictions and strategies of tomorrow. Borrowing from the bunkers pre-apocalyptic mood this exhibition focuses on terrors of military prowess - from Cold War tensions, Balkan massacres, violence, revolutions and the societies these events leave in their wake. The images offered address the past with a message of urgency that talk to the present and imagine the future, at an end of an era, in the light of our rapidly changing social and political environment.
Irit Rotgoff writes: 'In Nancy's assertion that "everything, then, passes between us" do we not also have the conditions of the exhibition? And in these conditions do we not have the possibilities to shift the gaze away from art works that might critically alert us to certain untenable states of the world, away from exhibitions that make those states of hegemonic breach and unease the subject and focal point of saturated vision, and towards everything that passes between us in the process of those confrontations. Therefore we do not necessarily undergo an experience of being informed, of being cautioned, of being forced to look at that which we might so comfortably avert our gaze from, but perhaps we recognize how deeply embedded we are in the problematic, of how mutual our disturbance and fear and that we in Nancy's words 'share this turmoil' as the very production of its meanings.'
Curated by Lala Raščić