Vladimir Tupanjac

Before and after 2000, 17 years later – study of the 3 “video-cases”, 60 min, Serbia, 2017

The end of the 20th century in Serbia was marked by almost traumatic historical events. In the years around 2000, a significant number of artwork emerges that more or less directly reflect and question the turbulent and often tragic ‘reality’ that surrounds them. For the generation of artists born in the 1970s, taking the stage most often meant a dialogue with formal and informal institutions of the art system, but perhaps the first questioning of the ‘necessity’ and ‘need for art’ in such historical circumstances, the search for boundaries of personal and professional uncertainties and dilemmas, and thinking about one’s own identity in the categories of private and public, free and controlled, daily crises and historical and political mythology. For example, the works of Vesna Vesić, Nikoleta Marković, Žolta Kovač and Miodrag Krkobabić, which were created between 1998 and 2001, will show us different procedures of self-positioning of artists in relation to some of these issues and dilemmas. We will try to recognize the common elements in their speech (in the first person) and in that way sketch what could be the collective identity of the generation that emerged at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.