INSTITUTIONAL CRITIC OF BOSNIAN AND HERZEGOVINIAN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART

The ZVONO art award is the only active platform to reward young artists in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, it's not a reason to avoid a critical approach. The group performed a subversive action of hacking very form and values of an ideal art work normally winning the competition - cliche war and post-war stories which invoke a feeling of compassion with the society in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The group created the most pathetic piece of bullshit and the work has been nominated for the winner.

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Excerpt:

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The work itself is a trash story about Igor's personal guilt that mostly relates to some media manipulated questions like inappropriate behavior during the war, gender issues, social responsibility etc. More detailed explication on superficial cognition of this work is to be found in the official statement sent in the application for the Zvono award. After applying with this “fake artwork” for the Zvono award 2011 it was selected for the finals with other three artworks, as we planned.

What is critic?

Since the moment this artwork was selected as representative for the Bosnian and Herzegovina reflection on contemporary arts there is an avalanche of new possible readings of the institutional critic and the methods it works with. The most significant point of this type of action is the elevation of a formal rhetorically based critic on the completely practical level. It is no longer some '”collateral writing”, a separate category inside some general cultural body that is easy to ignore and sabotage from the establishment's standing point. It is a Hacking of an Institution realized by TAČ.KA group that proves the previously conceptualized critical terms and brings in the traditional discourse of art critic an unexpected interactivity between both sides.