Andreja Kulunčić is an artist whose practice is characterised by complex interdisciplinary projects and socially engaged approach. Having developed artistically in the period of the disintegration of the former state, collapse of socialism and transitional turbulence that brought along de-industrialisation, unemployment, sale of public gods and the impoverishment of citizens, she has marked the contemporary artistic production with critically aimed, activating and methodologically innovative works such as the already-anthological Distributive Justice or Nama: 1908 employees, 15 department stores. In her 20-year practice, both in projects implemented in Croatia and the engagements on the occasion of various exhibitions and invitations from abroad for new productions, she developed a specific approach to the subject i.e. issue in which she is engaged. Starting from a specific situation and probing the terrain, she detects critical instances and, together with members of the community and experts of different profiles, researches the possibilities of normalisation of unbalanced relationships she encounters, thus constructing suitable surroundings for the articulation of issues and the possibility of change. Through the implemented projects, she opens up channels of communication, reinforces silenced voices, and enables the visibility of marginal and deprived groups. As is the case with the work On the State of the Nation, the development of which we had the opportunity to follow at the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery in Zagreb at the time, she often draws attention to the stereotypes supported by the dominant position of the relationships among social groups. Furthermore, she does not hesitate to intrude into institutionally defined societal structure. Such examples are works Bosnians Out! or 1CHF=1VOICE in which she exposed the discriminatory laws of states towards marginalised groups i.e. towards those who have been marginalised or made completely invisible exactly by these laws. In the aforementioned works, they are immigrant workers: Bosnian workers in Slovenia or illegalised immigrants in Switzerland. The three Bosnian workers who were employed on the renovation of the building of the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana while Bosnians Out! was in production, have co-authored said work; it is worth pointing out that they signed the contract under the same conditions as the author, and were given the same fee.

Different forms of collaboration, cooperation and participation make up the artistic method of Andreja Kulunčić, but also serve as the artistic product. Her works go through a temporal process and include context, the entirety of human relationships, collaboration of experts, and the usage of different technologies and media. These are all factors of a dynamic structure that is being created, and from which communication as the artistic method, process and product is extracted. In fact, it is exactly the mental process that lies at the basis and centre of the development of work, but also the peculiarity of its artistic practice: during project implementation, the mental maps that take form on the wall of the artist’s studio are transfigured into interaction and collaboration of the actors – participants and the audience – and spread their branches into the field of everyday life. In the gallery space, they are transformed into exhibition design that is always conceived bearing in mind the logic of the audience mentally navigating the installation with ease. Furthermore, the visitors are actively involved in the exhibition space. They give it a finishing touch, define contexts, and create new conscious communities, the view of which is directed beyond the gallery walls, towards the ‘real’ social space. Hereby we have partially stepped onto the territory of Boris Groys. He emphasised the significance of the setup in spaces of contemporary art, whereby spatial installation is not merely an arrangement of objects but, rather, the entire space is a unique fragment of a heterogeneous situation that includes the participatory relationship of visitors and the installation. “The media artist,” he said, “selects, overtakes, modifies, redacts, changes, combines, reproduces, arranges, classifies, exhibits, or encloses.“1  In other words, he combines methods and overtakes methodologies, which enables him to offer the audience a change in the established perspective, to expose the dominant order, to bring into awareness the inauthenticity of the political consensus, and to stimulate change. This is exactly how the summary of the artistic statement of Andreja Kulunčić should read.

Let us regard in this context Creative Strategies, a recent complex interdisciplinary and multimedia project that she has started to develop in 2010 through independent and mutually complementing modules, including several gallery i.e. museum setups. These exhibitions were organised in Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic, in museums of contemporary art in Mexico City and Belgrade, and in galleries in Subotica and the Nova Gallery in Zagreb, while she is currently preparing the versions of the exhibition for Johannesburg and Hong Kong.

The starting point of Creative Strategies is primarily the fact that institutional mechanisms that should serve the lives of citizens are often insufficient and inadequate, which entails everyday getting-by, and the development of personal and group strategies and inventions; the resulting forms of self-organisation have thus created a rich and useful resource for the enhancement of living conditions.

The chronologically first module, Everyday Divergences, included the research of five experts on the political potential of public space. They were philosopher Ankica Čakardić, media theoretician Katarina Peović Vuković, ethnologist and anthropologist Tomislav Pletenac, and architects Dafne Berc and Dominko Blažević. The artistic production concentrated on life in the so-called Mamooth (Mamutica) building in New Zagreb, built in 1974, in which 5.500 people reside in 1.200 flats. The building is surrounded by a wide belt of greenery of the park in Travno District, the surface of which is linked to the number of flats. The City Utility Company maintains the front part of the park; however, the latter did not become a place of gathering. The back part, albeit unkempt, has in time fallen under the self-organising ‘jurisdiction’ of residents and is a lively place of their gathering. Were we to view the building and the park as a structured community in which the residents intrude with new forms of sociability and spatial interventions – both of which was researched by the author, who also organised in the final phase a prize-winning presentation of the residents’ activity, whereby they selected among themselves the three most interesting and creative models of community participation: collecting and maintaining the folklore and ethnological collection, the organisation of assistance to the elderly residents, and the jointly built bocce field – we can recognise the divergencesfrom everyday life that are, in fact, resistances to the institutional structure on the one hand, and a cohesive strength of the community on the other.

Having been invited to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City (MUAC) in 2013/2014, Andreja Kulunčić opted to develop the second module titled Conquering and Constructing the Common. She studied the poorest communities from the marginal regions of Mexico City that function solely by virtue of the forms of self-organisation, with which they compensate for the deficiencies and dysfunctionalities of institutional structures. It is worth noting that Mexico has a highly differentiated population and a dysfunctional state system. In such social surroundings, the artist invited the self-organising communities into the Museum to talk about the examples of their practice, she organised workshops, and invited experts, students and other guests, thus enabling the visibility of deprived marginal groups in the space of dominant culture. Being aware of the fact that she had found herself on the positive pole of power, she used the privileged position as an artist of Caucasian descent from Europe to figure as a transfer to the oppressed voices. By drawing poor communities into the system, she created a paradoxical situation: she subverted the system by showing those who have been deprived by it, and consolidates it as she ‘minimises the mistake’, thus offering the system a chance to restructure itself with respect to the perception of relationships within the community.

The space of MUAC became a creative zone of learning and critical reflection for the duration of the exhibition. One of the basic postulates of the artist’s strategy is art as the environment for knowledge, meetings, education, communication and collaboration. As is the case with her earlier works Closed Reality – Embryo, Distributive Justice or On the State of the Nation, the artistic space is also transformed here – to quote the artist herself – into a “social laboratory.”

The third module of Creative Strategies has also been built on said principles. The Toolkit for a Joint Action, the initial variety of which we were able to see around the middle of last year at the Nova Gallery in Zagreb, is part of the project To Begin as Best as We Can by the curatorial collective WHW. This time, Andreja Kulunčić invited several activist groups to collaborate with her: Direct Democracy in Schools, New Syndicate, BRID – Platform for Workers’ Initiative and Democratisation, Women’s Front, Fem Front, ZMAG – Green Network of Activist Groups, and The Right to the City. With the idea to create a platform for the development of education primarily of closed and remote communities, of critical deliberation, and of active participation in political and cultural environment, they jointly conceived discursive materials for the Toolkit, thus encompassing basic notions from their fields, and listing the works cited as well as the map and archive of the workers’ struggle. The material, including the previous modules, is available and constantly updated at the website www.početnica.org  that is embodied in interactive furniture i.e. ‘toolkit’ that can be transferred to different locations. Led by the group Direct Democracy in Schools, the Toolkit will be visiting Croatian towns throughout the year with the aim to educate, inform, bring into awareness, open the dialogues and activate the audience, primarily the high school students for whom it is intended.

In that sense, art becomes the tool for the transfer of knowledge, and offers infrastructure for the informal education and creation of new creative strategies that can respond to specific situations and states in society.

Irena Bekić

1 Boris Groys: Učiniti stvari vidljivima. Strategije suvremene umjetnosti. Zagreb, MSU, 2006, p. 100