++++ Running a little bit late, Branislav Dimitrjevic comes from winterly Belgrade gesticulating into the lecture theatre of the Städelschule. The likeable director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Belgrade, in his mid-thirties, does not waste another minute and starts the first lecture in the Manifesta 4 series. Without any qualms about grasping the nettle, the European project is casting its shadow before itself. Discussion, artistic exchange and experiment can begin.
For three months, Manifesta 4, the European Biennial for Contemporary Art, will be visible at various venues in the city, from 25 May until 25 August. And under the guiding idea of the processual nature of this enterprise, the focus will be on the approach of open communication.
The first Manifesta lecture is also to be understood in this way. The beginning, with a view toward Serbia, one of the most maltreated stretches of country in recent European history, is significant. The agile, thoughtful and sometimes also apparently absent-minded Dimitrjevic speaks about how social conditions are transformed and established in art and culture with reference to the position of the fine arts in Serbia after Milosevic. He provides a graphic, subjectively flavoured sketch of developments in the past 50 years.
The central point of this overview is the artistic self-portrait. Is it more narcissism or political statement of the artists? Or is it rather a paradoxical act of self-destruction? If in Yugoslavia shortly after the Second World War there was still a doctrine that art has to be critical, but simultaneously also affirmative, tendencies in the sixties already revealed the disappointment with the victorious "red bourgeoisie". This was followed in the seventies by the despair and identity crisis of Serbian artists. But at the exhibition Konverzacija last year, the avant-garde of artists of the nineties shows clearly humorous traits, the lecturer pointed out. But there was no lack of depth, too.
Dimitrjevic's examples included Milica Tomic recalling a repressed mass hanging in Belgrade by the Nazis in 1941 by means of a self-portrait as a glossy cover; Michael Milunovic shows himself surreally as president behind the red lectern in the middle of the city on an expressway flyover; and Phil Collins, an Irish photographer, displays portraits of young Serbians lying in a park in the centre of Belgrade. All the persons shown are strangely enraptured, "romantic, sexy, lethal, intimate, bucolic". Or they are simply disappointed souls. Something has happened. An Irishman in Belgrade shows the youth of a country which consists not only of visible ruins.
The next Manifesta 4 lecture will be held on 25 January, 7 p.m. in the Städelschule, Dürerstr. 10. Information is also available on the internet at www.manifesta.de