Andreja Kulunčić never begins an artwork for no apparent reason. It may seem rather arbitrary or redundant to write something like that at the beginning of a text written to present and, as far as possible, summarize several years of intense work done by this artist, as well as her active presence on the Croatian and international art scene. However, the purpose of this statement is to indicate the radical shift that Andreja Kulunčić has taken in her artistic practice with respect to the conventional modernist paradigms of artistic subject, which one may succinctly express, among other things, with the famous saying: "No day without a line", whereby brushstrokes would manifest a more or less successful association with a sort of supernatural inspiration that guarantees artistic quality and artistic genius. According to that point of view, it is rather irrelevant what time or space that artistic activity is taking place in - as a matter of fact, it can take place anywhere, since the supernatural inspiration, thus understood, cannot be circumscribed by the earthly coordinates of time and place.

For Andreja Kulunčić, it is precisely the time and place, the "here and now" of a specific social moment, that are the crucial factors of - and eventually also the primary reasons for - her artistic activity. Ever since 2000, when she realized her project called Nama, her work has been linked to relevant social and political issues, which she most frequently articulated precisely in public spaces - including not only urban spaces, but also the mainstream media. In order to understand the way in which Kulunčić approaches this public space - how the topics that she seeks to make visible are becoming a part of urban and media space (otherwise saturated by commercial and spectacular attractions) - it is necessary to define one of the basic strategies that she has been using in such projects: that of mimicry. The form of her artworks, placed in public places, is often mimicking the existing forms of public communication: newspaper ads, advertising billboards, city-lights posters, news articles, radio documentaries, etc. These forms serve to "sneak" closer to the targeted recipient of her message - the passer-by and consumer of the media, used to the informing and advertising strategies that are commonly employed in conveying the message.

However, what makes Kulunčić's work a mimicry - a skilful, subversive exploitation of conventional forms - is the fact that the message she is making visible is exactly the opposite of the usual mass-messages sent off by commercials and by the media. It is an inversion of content that "awakens" the observer or even shocks him, throwing him out of his slumbering "state of spam," of being overwhelmed by consumerist urges and the prevailing political passivity. The Nama project (2000), for example, took place in the midst of a long strike of Nama's employees because the insolvent department store was on the verge of being closed down. Whereas the media were constantly reporting on the dramatic situation of the employees, Kulunčić made an inversion and even ironized the situation. She conceived of an advertising campaign for Nama, in which disadvantaged female workers of the rundown company were posing like models, their photographs flooding Zagreb in the form of city-lights posters. The characteristic feature of Kulunčić's work is that she transposes the underprivileged subjects, as well as the social problem as such, from their inferior position into a temporarily superior one. Instead of pity, which is what the media were offering at best, she turned the employees of Nama into the empowered protagonists of action, while the key message was no longer the ruin of Nama or the individual tragedies of its miserable workers (with whom one could sympathize or not), but rather the ruin of Nama as a collective tragedy of the society.

Art projects by Andreja Kulunčić never contain an explicit narrative of an individual's destiny; instead, the particular (a name, a person, etc.) emerges as an image of the general, or rather, the particular simultaneously presents a picture of the broader social problem. It is precisely with that 'a-personal' approach, by avoiding individual destinies, that the artist has managed to evade all pathos or further exoticization of the 'other'. The point is to raise the awareness of the fact that an individual problem can also be social and that, by taking another turn, it can become individual again, since a social problem necessarily affects each of its members. In Austrians Only (2005), the artist designed and published appealing advertisements in colour in an Austrian newspaper, in which she was offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to Austrian citizens only: an "excellent" job of a cleaning man/woman, with a minimum salary and with no social rights. By this mimicking gesture, she turned the problem of illegal immigrants in Austria - which had already become a question of the collective subconscious in that country, including the suppressed hypocrisy of 'legal' Austrian citizens - into a problem of "genuine" Austrians, since she brought them into a situation where they were forced to imagine themselves in an embarrassing and deprived position of illegal immigrants.

Kulunčić's most recent project On the State of the Nation (2008) likewise includes interventions in the mainstream media. The artist has been publishing a sort of virus-news in the Croatian media, in cooperation with journalists and members of social minorities, which force the dominant white, male, Catholic-Croatian citizen, precisely while he is reading his favourite sports news, to remember uneasily the existence of the Others: homosexuals, Chinese, or Roma, who likewise constitute the Croatian society and who share one and the same social and living space. Thus, the project has formulated a new model of promoting tolerance and more generally - a possibility of deconstructing the 'otherness' in the Croatian society.

Beside in Austrians Only, Andreja Kulunčić dealt with the issue of illegal immigrants in a project entitled 1CHF=1VOICE (2007/2008), which turned that invisible segment of Swiss society into the sponsors of Swiss government in a campaign that invited illegal immigrants to make donations for the reconstruction of the Swiss parliament. Kulunčić has called it a 'political/artistic' intervention, since this time she quite literally gave a voice to those who did not have it, by which she did exactly the opposite of what so many participatory art projects do, namely isolate the Other by 'helping' him/her and thus reasserting his/her position of Otherness. Contrary to that, Andreja Kulunčić regularly succeeds in avoiding the position of the 'helping hand' and the trap of patronizing - since by the afore-mentioned inversion she turns expectations into wonder, attracts attention, and dislocates the observer's position into that of a reflecting subject, excluded from everyday life.

Is the very fact that an art project is collaborative, participatory, and empowering enough to legitimate it as socially praiseworthy and in extension important for promoting pluralism of all sorts, genuine democracy, etc.? Does such an approach (ethically biased) make it more difficult to evaluate projects such as those by Andreja Kulunčić as art projects? In order to reflect properly on socially engaged artistic practices, one should also reflect on their limitations, contexts, responsibilities, or rather questions such as: whom does such a practice address, what is its social function? It seems, however, that in evaluating such practices, apart from considering strategies they use or their social efficiency, one should also keep in mind the very origin of the practice and its primary motivation. As British critic Claire Bishop has suggested, "the best socially collaborative art does not derive from the superegoic injunction to 'love thy neighbour,' but from the position of 'do not give up on your desire'". The first approach ("love thy neighbour") presupposes a certain amount of sacrifice and actually derives from the politically correct position that takes for proper what is "proper" in the eyes of others, while the logic of the latter relies on taking responsibility for one's own desire rather than acting on account of feeling guilty. Beside the fact that Andreja Kulunčić never embarks on a project for no apparent reason, as we have stated in the first sentence, she also never embarks on one without a strong feeling of responsibility, combined with an equal amount of artistic curiosity and flexibility that, in collaborative or other processes that her projects must go through each day, leaves enough space for surprises and unexpected outcomes. In all those situations, Andreja Kulunčić never gives up on her desire.

Ivana Bago/Antonia Majača