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ANDREJA
KULUNČIĆ: VOLUME-UP
A text on the work of Andreja
Kulunčić
Andreja Kulunčić’s area of interest is a societal space
that is comprised of invisible, inaudible, absent, superfluous
voices, in other words, all those “unimportant voices”
that are rejected in statistics. However much these voices
belong to small communities, ghettoized groups, “outsiders”
and “others”, some sort of islanders in a sea
of mutually linked and dependent groupings, without which,
it seems, society could function quite well, their sum, undoubtedly,
in the long-run presents a seeming “silent majority”.
This is the same majority that has no influence on public
opinion, that has no spokespersons or its protectors, which
is neither black nor white, and precisely because of its non-existence
of sharp contrasts uninteresting to agencies researching public
opinion, harmless for political cartographers, faceless for
manufacturers of history, unproductive for visionaries of
the future…
Whether the subject is about laid-off female employees from
the department store chain NAMA
(NAMA - 1908 employees, 15
department stores, Zagreb, 2000) or the anonymous inhabitants
of a tourist coastal city who have no influence on its development
nor any relations of power in the city (Zadar:
City-Walks, 2001); or even about the “worldwide
artist brother/sisterhood” (self)isolated from social
currents and the flow of capital (Artist
from…, Manifesta 4, Frankfurt 2000), or on the
illegal migrants whose fates are sealed in more or less civilized
detention centers for foreigners (Sight.seeing,
Graz, 2003), the position from which Andreja Kulunčić approaches
her subject is far from a documentary-like recording of the
actual facts. Articulating her visual language in the marginal
area within which artistic methods mix in with non-artistic
media (billboard ads, tourist brochures, fliers, etc.), “postponing”
the desired effect with its specific disguise of media, and
placing her work in public spaces which are not primarily
intended for art (billboards and advertising panels, streets,
a tourist office, a hotel reception area), the artist establishes
a necessary distance - an interspace, if you will - using
“Verfremdungsefekt” in order to jerk us out of
our indifference, resignation, detachment, and paving the
way for critical thought.
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Zadar:
City-Walks
(brochure on display and in public use)
Andreja
Kulunčić |
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The artist does not take on the role of a ventriloquist,
nor does she wish to lend her voice to the “voiceless”.
Rather, she believes how it is possible to participate in
consciousness-raising, in “strengthening” the
existing voice. As with many who formed themselves as artists
during the nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, during
the era of strong social and economic restructurings, equally
in the West as in the East, she is aware that art can no longer
offer radical solutions nor change the world. Unlike the critical
art of the sixties and seventies, which authentically argued
for the possibility of social change through art, art at the
turn of the new millennium can offer as its program only a
mending of the world, striving, with its meager “patching-up
of things”, to make life on this planet bearable. It
is with good reason then that Nicolas Bourriaud claims that
grand narratives, characteristic during the modernism era,
are being replaced by micro-utopias. The artists of the nineties
are aware that they are not expanding the boundaries of art,
rather just testing the resistance which art proffers within
the global social field.
Andreja Kulunčić, the paradigmatic representative of art
at the turn of the new millennium, of “art as a production
of knowledge”, is interested, above all, in this world,
the here and now. There is no “other place”, the
artist commented in one interview.
Having grown up and been brought up in turbulent times and
place (born in 1968 in Subotica, Yugoslavia; educated in Belgrade
and in Budapest in the late eighties and early nineties; from
1995 lives in Zagreb), Andreja carries with her a specific
place and time as her “luggage” - equally as a
burden and as a valuable inheritance. The time of transition
in post-communist countries brought out the worst of two worlds
- capitalism and communism - a free market combined with ideological
fundamentalism, whose accompanying manifestations will become
the central issues in her work.
Not satisfying herself with the illusion of democracy, which
has come to have all the more followers and victims, and committing
herself to the role of the artist, and not, say, the role
of a political activist or journalist, Andreja Kulunčić firmly
believes how it is possible, through art, to act on the “society
of spectacle”, how it is possible to participate responsibly
in the creation of change of consciousness, the creation of
a critical mass which could realize social “repairs”.
In the time of “global paranoia” (Žarko Paić),
“battles of everyone against everyone” (Pierre
Bourdieu), the state of general uncertainty, to dedicate oneself
to the ethic of new solidarity, however much this may seem
naive to cynical intellectuals.
Indeed, critical minds the likes of Pascal Bruckner, state
how the system is programmed as such, so that through finding
fault renewal takes place, drawing out its vitality from attack,
just like communism “saved” capitalism. Is there,
therefore, any hope that neoliberalism will tire itself out,
desert? Is there such a thing as an alternative to capitalism?
In an indirect way, Andreja Kulunčić poses similar questions,
making use of art documentation as the underlying medium.
Her work is accessible to the public in the art space only
via art documentation. Setting up the art documentation of
a project which takes place in a public space, in the form
of an installation in an art gallery, the artist, using the
words of Boris Groys, through resiting and inscription into
an actual space, transforms the artificial into something
living, adding to it an aura of something original and unrepeatable.
Rendering the boundary of life and art unclear, Kulunčić
undoubtedly confirms Groys’s thesis on the role and
place of art in the time of biopolitics. “For those
who devote themselves to the production of art documentation
rather than of artworks, art is identical to life, because
life is essentially a pure activity that does not lead to
any end result,” claims Groys.
It is not surprising then that the works of Andreja Kulunčić,
often the result of cooperation with a team of experts from
various fields (Closed
Reality - Embryo, 1999-2000; Distributive
Justice, 2001-2003) - creating a type of social
laboratory - are not easily distinguishable from life, from
statistical analyses, tables, graphs, decrees, plans, which
are also the dominant media for biopolitics.
What is remarkable in these team works is that the boundary
between life and art is completely arbitrary, while the artist
strives to remain on the sidelines, maintaining the position
of observer whose standpoint cannot be determined with certainty,
just as with life itself.
Andreja Kulunčić’s neutral standpoint, however, is
only an illusion: with the conscious pulling back into the
background, the artist strives to expand the space of the
observer in order for them to take on their own standpoint
and to speak out in their own voice.
Nada Beroš
Art Critic, Curator and Editor based in Zagreb, Croatia
Andreja Kulunčić
(HR)
Artist based in Zagreb, Croatia
http://www.andreja.org/
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