13.00-16.45 Seminar presentations

• 13.00-13.15 Welcome
• 13.15-13.45 Carsten Juhl: Borders in an Expanded Field
• 13.45-14.15 Rainald Schumacher: Shedding light upon diaspora art from ex Yugoslavia with examples from Telekom Art Collection
• 14.15–14.45 Tanja Ostojić: Transformative Encounters: Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić (2011-17) and Misplaced Women? (ongoing since 2009)
• Pause
• 15.00-15.30 René Block: “In the Gorges of the Balkans” and other Balkan experiences during the years 2003-2006
• 15.30-15.40  Final remarks by Tijana Miskovic
• 15.45-16.45 Debate led by Zlatko Jovanović “The Balkans: locality, trope, imagination”

In the 30-minute afternoon presentations during the 2-day seminar, a  group of international speakers will focus on theoretical, curatorial, and especially artistic attempts to redefine the notion of belonging by directing us to look in-between and beyond established national and cultural structures. Furthermore, there will be a cinema-screening program in the morning hours, including video artworks related to the seminar theme.

Thematically, the seminar program will be organized around three lines that question the notion of

LAND/SOIL – Territorial belonging, as well as heritage, in the situation of displacement.

ARCHITECTURE – Protective construction that evokes physical and mental belonging in the context of destruction, trauma, and rebuilding.

CITY SPACE – Urban patterns for thinking, communicating, and social acting in both diversity and unity.

Background: 

In the ‘90s, the multinational Balkan country Yugoslavia dissolved. The nationalism took over Tito’s concept of “brotherhood and unity”, and the violent war resulted in millions of people being displaced. However, the Balkan concept of a multicultural coexistence, which can be traced back not only to Tito’s Yugoslavia, but also to the culturally diverse Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, did not disappear. In fact, it has transitioned from a concept of peripheral otherness of Europe into one of diasporic inbetweenness of Europe.

Today, other war refugees, as well as environmental migrants, are fleeing their places of origin to new territories in search of better futures. This increasing worldwide displacement is calling for a redefinition of the concept of belonging by thinking beyond established structures.

The artists who left Yugoslavia after the ‘90s – and now live in what we, for lack of a better word, call a diaspora – might be able to provide a useful “third point of view” amidst Europe’s actual struggle to maintain its concept of coexistence “in unity and diversity” because they are intrinsically connected to several contexts of liminality. (They come from the Balkans, which historically has been considered a periphery of Europe, being both an exotic and obscure “other”. Additionally, they’ve gained yet another layer of “otherness” as a displaced generation of immigrants living between cultures.)

Event image: Mila Panic, “Burned Field”, 2017

The seminar is supported by:

Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond

Billedhuggeren, professor Gottfred Eickhoff og hustrus, maleren Gerda Eickhoffs Fond

A Hereford Beefstouw

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