How to End the Message

The exhibition “How to End a Massage” is the result of four workshops “How to Send a Message/How to Produce a Contemporary Art Work – step by step” (HSM) in collaboration with Nordic and Serbian artists, performed in Belgrade and Helsinki 2002-2004. The HSM workshop is the project of the artist Milica Tomic, who has been using it for some time as a didactic strategy in the field of contemporary arts. The initial concept was to explore how a production process of an (art)work – always a traumatic event in itself – could be made visible. The concept follows the structure of a process of sending a message, using contemporary art as a medium. In other words, the HSM is about the complexity of the relationship between the sender and the receiver in the field of contemporary art.

Artists have participated the whole process of the exhibition production. They have analyzed the key problems in the production of a contemporary art exhibition, and articulated the problems of the politics and strategies of representation, such as how to get out of a micro community of the contemporary art consumers and how to make the works of contemporary art accessible and intelligible to a non-initiated public? Through the analysis of these problems, the artists organized themselves into five working groups: a group for the visual identity of the exhibition, a group for the presentation from which the work Collaborative Statement developed, a group for strategy and tactics, a group for propaganda, and a group for archive and web site of the exhibition.

Artists have collaborated with the architect and theorist Ljiljana Blagojevic, and the architectural group “Expeditio” (M. Lopicic, N. Ilincic, D.Eres, M. Todorovic) in Belgrad. They have jointly defined the place, the space and the way in which a particular work will be presented-exhibited. This process meant striving towards a principle: a single work – a single politics and strategy of presentation, not a violent unification of representation of representing in relation to an already existing exhibition space. The artworks are defined in relation to the complex conditions and the situation of Belgrade, as well as the specific locations where the works will be realized, such as bookshops, travel agency, family magazine, Student Culture Centre, “Zvono” Gallery, National Museum etc. The exhibition will be a part of the international exhibition “Continental Breakfast” curated by Anda Rottenberg. Pressetext

How to End the Message
Various locations, Belgrade, Serbia

mit Jasper Alvaer, Arbeitsgruppen, Ivan Bon, Marko Crnobrnja, Dragan Djordjevic, Minna Henriksson and Alexander Nikolic, Ann-Cathrin Hertling, Björn Kowalski, Karri Kuoppala, Milica Ruzicic, Dragan Rajsa, Miodrag Vargic, Perttu Saksa, Boris Sribar, Maja Rakocevic, Darinka Pop-Mitic, John Makinen, Ivan Bon

Zusammenarbeit von NIFCA und Milica Tomic, Ljiljana Blagojevic, Expeditio, Helsinki Art Academy, Belgrade Art Academy, Student Culture Centre, Colture Centre “Dom Omladine”
Koordination: Marita Muukkonen
http://www.norden.org