Two bridges beyond the border by Anna Marangoni

With the installation titled “Balkan Baroque”, Marina Abramovic (Belgrade, 1946) won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 1997. The artist sat down for six hours a day, for four consecutive days, on a pile of cow bones, washing them and removing the flesh in an act of purification and evocation of the war.

More than 10 years later, contemporary art and reminiscences of Balkan wars meet in a new Art Biennial: starting in spring 2011 indeed, the Atomska Ratna Komanda of Konjic in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the largest bunker in the world, will became the venue of the Biennale of Contemporary Art, DO ARK Underground.

Center of military operations and command, as well as protection for Tito and his family in the event of nuclear war, the bunker, cost more than $ 4 billion and never used, will see its secret isolation reborn to new life and open its doors to the public. The artists will be invited to present their works in the vast maze of corridors and rooms that form this dark fortress 280 meters deep.

The initiative has already been awarded the Label of Excellence for Cultural Events (CECEL) by the Council of Europe.

The Biennale DO ARK Underground looks like one of the biggest cultural events at international level and will reflect the potential to establish a network not only among artists in the Balkans, but also between them and the institutions and artists in the world. The Greek Jannis Kounellis, leading exponent of Arte Povera movement in Italy, has already joined the project. At this regard, is particularly significant his first visit to Sarajevo in 2004, marked by the installation that he created in the atrium of Vijećnica, the symbol of the destruction of the city (Figure 2). With this work, the books of the National Library returned in the spaces of Vijećnica for the first time since the beginning of the war and the public started to pay attention to the ancient palace.

The idea of creating a “Balkan Biennial” started from Jusuf Hadžifejzović, Bosnian, one of the most significant artist on the Balkan stage and curator of the exhibition together with the director of the National Theatre of Montenegro Petar Ćuković and the art historian Branislav Dimitrijević from Belgrade. The project has several partners, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Banja Luka, the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo (SCCA), the Gallery of the Collegium Artisticum of Sarajevo and the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade.

Since many years, Jusuf Hadzifejzovic has worked on a project focusing on cultural reconstruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in cooperation with other States of former Yugoslavia; the project aims at promoting artists of young generations at the international level.

One of the aims of the Biennial is in fact to help young local artists from different cultural backgrounds, to get a broader visibility. In Jusuf Hadžifejzović’s work clearly appears the intent of combining the regional and global creative processes, paying attention to emphasize the value of “underground” cultures which, as happens in South-eastern Europe, risk to disappear under the pressure of dominant cultures.

The Biennale DO ARK Underground is therefore one of the initiatives that illustrate the cultural effervescence through the world of contemporary arts in the Balkans in general and in Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular, where a second major project is taking shape.

Indeed in Sarajevo will be established the new Ars Aevi Museum, an architectural complex that will host the contemporary art collection, that today is possible to visit, only by appointment, in the former mall Skender. The first exhibition hall has been designed by the architect Renzo Piano, author of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Shard of Glass, currently under construction at the London Bridge Quarter. The new Ars Aevi Museum should become the main centre for contemporary art in South East Europe, having for the city not only an economic impact, but also giving to Sarajevo the possibility to relaunch its role of multi-cultural crossroads that has long held over history.

Art in Sarajevo continues to struggle with everyday life (there are in fact several financial problems in the new Ars Aevi initiative), but it is also incredibly lively and effervescent.

At this point, the logical question – and is certainly not a new question – is to what extent contemporary art has the power to promote tolerance and peace, dialogue and mutual understanding. If we follow the theory according to which the artist and his work have a function of “mediators in the territory”, representing the third part essential to the negotiation of a joint agreement, then contemporary art is a crucial force, not neutral but alternative, to the understanding and to the conflict resolution. Balkan contemporary art, especially because it is impregnated of the current dynamics that cross its territory, and thanks to the new spaces made available, will find a privileged place at the negotiation table.

by Anna Marangoni

anna.marangoni@coleurope.eu