Art Research Communication

Breaking Step

June 21, 2007 at 8:55 pm in News, Views No Comments

ARC Co-Director Iliyana Nedkova was recently commissioned to write a review of the exhibition Breaking Step: a comprehensive group show of contemporary British art held at Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art, 24 Mar – 10 Jun 2007. The review focuses on the impressive range of site-specific commissions including new works by Nathan Coley, Phil Collins, Henry VIII Wives, Jim Lambie, Mike Nelson, Toby Paterson and Cathy Wilkes. The review was just published in MAP Magazine, Issue 10/Summer 2007.

‘I wish I were in their shoes’, says Uros Djuric, echoing Adam Chodzko’s M-Path (Belgrade Version), 2007. In the spirit of the Balkan ‘culture of complaint’* Djuric goes on to contemplate the shortage of support infrastructure for artists in Serbia. We talk while getting ‘bombarded’ by balls of all sizes from Wood and Harrison’s The Only Other Point, 2005 and Notebook, 2004. The balls appear as striking signifiers of lottery money and lucky draws for the arts in Britain. Just so stories about life cycles, cause and effect, improbability and accuracy, reminiscent of Fischli and Weiss’ earlier work The Way Things Go.

We are at the Salon, Old Belgrade’s outpost of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Beograd, where Djuric exhibited recently. The Salon is now showing Wood and Harrison’s video vignettes as part of Breaking Step a comprehensive group exhibition of contemporary British art in Belgrade. Initiated by Caroline Douglas, and co-curated by erudite and energetic Branislav Dimitrijevic, Sinisa Mitrovic and Jelena Vesic, Breaking Step is the culmination of four years of artists’ interventions, events and residencies in the city and beyond.

Humour and compassion, absurdity and ambiguity are the semantic keys to understanding the impressive range of site-specific commissions. The dream-like ambience of Toby Paterson’s new paintings marks the artist’s latest encounter with the vernacular of modernism in and around Belgrade atop his skateboard. With generic titles such as Bank Lobby, Interchange Stairwell, In Blok 21, Fountain Paterson’s works reveal a sensibility for the project of socialist post-war architecture ‘cast adrift in a society that has pronounced it a failure’. They also hint at the artist’s own mapping of the sprawling area of high-rise ‘bloks’. Arranged in a signature grid structure his works are embedded in the fabric of the museum, itself a fine slice of modernity and a triumph of International Style over Socialist Brutalism. A tale of two rivers, the Danube and the Sava, and as many ideologies, the building was conceived and constructed in the 1960s as one of the first purpose-built art museums in the Balkans.

Belgrade’s urban space and recent turbulent history are also inscribed in Nathan Coley’s Camouflage Bajrakli Mosque, 2007. By creating sculptural scale models of such symbolic sites and places of worship, Coley poses questions about the meanings we invest in architecture. How, for example, can religious institutions reinvent their raison d’etre? The re-creation of the artist’s acclaimed work There will be no miracles here, 2007 continues his investigations into power and authority. The low-tech, fairground-like lights sculpture was sited in the park between the museum and another iconic modernist building constructed in the 1960s as Yugoslavia’s Communist Party HQ. Turned into a stronghold of the Milosevic regime, the building miraculously survived the NATO bombings in 1999 to become a business centre in the 2000s.

Phil Collins, probably the only honorary Belgrader amongst the artists in Breaking Step, speaks of ‘the massive joy and absolute privilege’ of showing in this city. His free fotolab, 2007 ‘germinated’ at the flea markets of Belgrade, as well as amongst his refugee friends in London. It is a poignant reminder that in exceptional emotional circumstances, photography could be our last resort but equally can terrify us. People are encouraged to donate their old rolls of film, to be developed free of charge in exchange of the artist’s right to use the images as he sees fit. A public contract of an artwork, the death of 35mm colour film aesthetised, the photographic apparatus of representation demystified, or ‘a heartfelt yet troubled exchange’?

Both Mike Nelson and the artists’ collective Henry VIII’s Wives engage with iconic mo(nu)ments of European cultural heritage. Nelson constructs a tongue-in-cheek hall of mirrors around Great Widow, 1907 a ‘heavy-weight’ sculpture from the museum collection by the prominent Yugoslav artist Ivan Mestrovic. Henry VIII’s Wives use Belgrade as the next stop en route to erect Vladimir Tatlin’s Tower, 1919. The artists fabricated life-size fragments from the centre of Tatlin’s visionary skyscraper. Dislocated in space and time, but united in the artists’ process-led intention Tatlin’s Tower and the World, 2007 carries an air of abstract minimalism akin to Richard Serra’s large scale assemblies of sheet metal.

Cathy Wilkes and Jim Lambie also work within and in response to the generous space of the museum to create new room-size installations. Their off-the wall aesthetics are further enhanced by the multiple viewpoints from different levels in the museum, and the artists’ contrasting styles. Evoking the story of Jochabed who bestowed her baby to the waters of the Nile, Wilkes’ work is a sensual visualisation of invisible labour and corporeal routines. Here the body is implicated as an intuitive and intellectual battleground, while repetition is a virtue. This allows her work to grow organically from earlier installations (She is Pregnant Again, 2005) by reinvigorating found objects, paintings and handcrafted things.

For Lambie, continuity, expectation and freedom also merge to inform his often ’smart and grotesque faux-modernist abstractions’. His new floor ‘painting’ laid in ubiquitous duct tape assumes black and white Op Art charisma. A giant canvas hosting found objects in an explosion of colour, shapes and textures. Notable is the recurrent motif of the mattress stuck on the wall, and covered with dripping blood-red paint: perhaps an implicit reverence to Mladen Stilinovic’s performative work Buried Pain, 2000 where the burial of mattresses raises a chuckle and defies the popular perception of the Balkans as synonymous with chaos and heartache.

* Please see Luchezar Boyadjiev’s How To Turn Your Liability Into An Asset: Media, Art And Politics In Post-Communist Bulgaria, In Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Inteligentsia, pp. 58-74 Ed. Geert Lovink, MIT Press, 2003

All photography by Iliyana Nedkova.