J.V.:  I want to thank all the enthusiasts who came here tonight to see Andrea Kulnčić's fascinating work. There are two videos entitled A reconstruction of an unimportant day in our history and A reconstruction of an important day in our history, which I had the opportunity to see in a far more spectacular context, more precisely in the frame of the project The Dictionary of War, where various artists, critics, theorists and activists had been invited to discuss the subject of war, through a kind of performative public speech.
The first part - A Reconstruction of an unimportant day in our history- shows a day in the life of Josip Broz Tito, during his stay in the country, in the Tikveš castle, which is also known as "Tito's Castle'. A passionate hunter, Tito often stayed there with his wife Jovanka, or with eminent foreign statesmen, who would join him for the sport and the exclusive entertainment in the Castle and its grounds .
The second part - A reconstruction of an important day in our history - shows the meeting of the two presidents: Franjo Tuđman and Slobodan Milošević. The meeting of the Croatian and Serbian president, which is reconstructed here, was held on April the 15th, 1991, in the same castle - the first conflicts of the war happened in the beginning of May, just 15-20 days after this meeting. It is interesting to note that during the war, the castle was used as the headquarters of Arkan's paramilitary units. Today, the castle is destroyed, and its current state is shown in both videos.
Video-notes A Reconstruction of an unimportant day in our history and A reconstruction of an important day in our history are based on the narration of the custodian of the Tikveš castle. He reconstructs minutely everything that took place during those two, apparently unconnected visits. His story is initiated by a torrent of questions coming voiced by an insistant Andrea giving the impression of a police investigation. Andrea was interested in all details: the exact times of the presidents' arrivals and departures, the paths of their walks in the castle's grounds, the menus of their protracted dinners, etc. Her research, besides other things, reveals the organization and protocol followed in those kinds of exclusive political meetings , as well as the everyday 'decor' in which politicians - those who decide on the lives of regular people - circulate in. The development of trivial and essentially non-important actions, which Andrea emphasizes in these works seems to delay the very event of the war, by suppressing it to the second plan, but at simultaneously, by using suspense as a narrative technique in the film, she heightens the tension of its terrifying presence.
For the purpose of this short introduction, I will now say a few things about the method, procedures and themes which are characteristic for Andrea's opus.
Andrea Kulunčić sees art as both research and process. Her work, regardless of the media in which it is created, whether seen by a passer-by, or an audience accustomed to reading works of art, is always realized as work-in-progress. Her work includes complex pre-operations, negotiations, or social actions which are not always visible in what we could call 'the surface of the representation' or 'the art object'… The art object emerges only as a 'frozen frame' of a long term process which is at the same time both artistic and social. In other words, Andrea Kulunčić does not act from the exclusive position of the artist-author, who just describes the social processes, but tries to intervene into the very apparatus of artistic production.
Her intervention is based on participatory forms of work, on projects which include or produce collectivity, as well as on the fact that the 'work' itself occupies a wider social space, both through its content and engagement, and the ways in which it is exhibited - which overcome the reductionist logic of the 'white cube' and of the privileged artistic community.
Some of the subjects that Andrea Kulunčić tackles deal with the inter-relations of art, economy, transitions, feminism and racism. These are themes which were less present in the videography of the region in the 1990's, since art in at that time in all the countries of the region of ex Yugoslavia was mostly marked by 'active escapism' or different forms of identitarian self-reflection, informed by popular geo-political themes and theories.

One of Andrea Kulunčić's first works is her well-known "Nama: 1908 employees, 15 department stores". This work represents a kind of breaking point within local art production as, contrary to problematizing national, gender or cultural identities which dominate the contemporary art of the 'periphery', it attempts to question the 'differences' on the economic level, through the positions of women previously employed in the NAMA department stores. They lost their basic rights to live and work during those times of transistion. It seems to me that the direction taken by Andrea with this work is particularly important as, an 'identitarian art' actually produces a veil of exoticism which gradually obscures burning issues related to the economy, the change of the social system, the installation of the capitalist order and the consequent segregation of society into the rich and the poor. Since these questions are also suppressed in the media, or their actuality only lasts as long as they are on the front pages of newspapers, then this work functions as some kind of a counter-public information channel.

A.K.: From the position of an author, the kind of artistic practice that you talked about is pretty problematic, especially in our region. We are constantly encountering the same questions such as: where to place those issues within art production, what can an artist achieve with such works, and also more generally, questions about art and democracy, the role of the artist as an active subject, etc. I hope that we will talk about this today, because I am interested in what is going on here, how people think about socially engaged art, or the role of art in society.
NAMA was one of the first works where I dealt with the problem of transition, the change of the social system and the lives affected by those changes. It was made in 2000. The subject of the international exhibition, for which I had conceptualized this work was "Art and Economy", given by the curators of the exhibition, the WHW collective. I started with the question: what NAMA in the present moment represents for all of us, and I saw that the most problematic issue in the whole story is the people's destiny, something we rarely talk about, because the destinies of those 1908 workers in NAMA department stores was not a particular destiny, but the destiny of the majority of the Croatian people. In the year 2000, the transformation (transition, as we like to call it) from a society where "we all - have it all|" to a society where "200 families - have it all and we - have nothing" was still occurring.

The change was sudden and most people couldn't with cope it. Then it seemed to me that the worst blow was suffered by women, similar to the woman on the poster, they were over 40, couldn't speak foreign languages, or use computers, who had spent their lives in, for example, NAMA (NAMA is short for the Peoples Store), which we were all once proud of. You probably remember that, NAMA department stores existed all over Yugoslavia. From the moment that they were established, they represented progress in a particular way, for example - they were equipped with escalators. The specificity of the decline of NAMA was its visibility. Factories and hotels that were also experiencing a decline at the same time, were not as visible. They were situated on the periphery of cities, and there were no "witnesses", as there were with NAMA. And the situation in NAMA was like this: the shelves were completely empty, the saleswomen stood in front of those empty shelves for 8 hours a day, without being payed, and they did so for 6 months.

All other shops in the city were full of goods, so while NAMA looked a little like an absurd "art intervention". As the above-mentioned exhibition was international, there were many foreign visitors, who would, after visiting NAMA ask us if it was a performance, a work of art or an action of some kind. Such a big department store, entirely empty, and those people in purple uniforms sitting and standing about all over the store. It looked absurd. So, those people worked for a full six months. Every day they would come to work, stand beside the empty shelves, sit behind the cash registers, and no customers would come and nothing was ever sold. Their answer to the question as to why do they stood in an empty shop and sat behind tempty cash registers was that they were used to it, and it was inconvenient for them to stand somewhere else. It was as if they belonged behind the empty desks, or beside the empty shelves. Married couples also worked there. When you stand there for six months without any pay - neither you, nor your husband - you go through a little family tragedy, you lose confidence, in your own eyes and your family's, you don't have money for basic needs, you don't know if anything will change in the future. Also, in 1908 there really were a large number of workers affected, especially if you take into account each worker's family so you could probably multiply the number of workers by 4...

When I started to work on the NAMA project women workers held a strike. For example, nine of them chained themselves to the National bank and held a hunger strike. That is an act of extreme despair, much more serious than, for example, a street protest, when people get out on the street, carrying placards and in that way share their problems with the wider community. I want to say that NAMA workers were already ready for much more drastic modes of visibility. That was the moment when I got involved in the whole process. As I start my projects with research, I spent two/three months talking with the unions. In this case there were, as is usual here, two unions in conflic with one another, but I tried to actively collaborate with both of them. I offered three different projects for the exhibition. They chose the project with the billboards in the center of the city, they chose something which seemed to them to be the most visible.

What was especially important for me, they understood - it is what I usually have the most problems with at home - this being that art can be involved with politics and social problems, that it doesn't end with the wall of the gallery or museum. They would tell me: "Yes, that's great, you will give us tools for getting onto the street in other way, nobody sees our strike anyway" which was true. People have developed a certain blindness for other peoples problems, they don't pay attention to people who strike, until they are in the same position themselves. The workers of NAMA agreed to appear on the posters. My wish was for them to look - I wouldn't say glamourous - but to look fresh, not as though they were suffering, not to make them look like somebody who had worked for six months with no pay, someone desperate because of the knowledge that the company they work for is falling apart and therefore having being hunger strike on the street. The message was important to me; I didn't want to provoke compassion but respect. We went to a professional photo studio, arranged for make up professionals and hair dressers to get them ready. We worked with three women, but as we didn't have enough money for all three to be on the posters- only one of them actually made the final poster; the other two were published in the daily papers that offered to support the project.
We got 10 poster placements for posters in the center of Zagreb, which cost at the time 5000 deutch marks. I see this donation as a very important point in the project, because as capitalism gets deeper into all parts of a society, there is less and less understanding for such projects. Our worker appeared on the same level as all other girls or models, who were selling mobile phones, cars and perfumes, while she was selling, as it was written on the poster, NAMA, or the plight of the 1908 employees and 15 department stores. For three days of having the posters up and visible - nothing happened, no reaction at all. We never told anybody that it was a part of an art project; the posters were placed before the exhibition was opened. It was only after three days that the first reactions began to make themselves known. Later people told me that they understood from the first day that "there was something wrong" with the posters, but it took them time to understand what. After a while, the reporters started to research who had put the posters up and for what reasons the posters had been placed around the city. They even called the director of NAMA, asking why he would spend money on advertising, while he wasn't paying his workers' salaries.
People started coming to NAMA, happily thinking it was filled with merchandise, but they would arrive to still find shelves empty. And finally, the key of the project was published in the daily papers, in the City pages, not in the Culture section, which is very important for me, because the project obtained a wider audience in that way. A journalist explained the poster in the following way: "The worker of NAMA witnesses the transition from socialism to capitalism." After that a discussion emerged, which had never been the case before - questions were put forward - who do we sell really? assets and people, not products. The debate expanded the question to, not only inlclude the issue of those 1908 workers, but to discuss the thousands of other workers in companies who shared the same destiny. It was a personal destiny of that particular worker, but also the shared destiny of a large number of workers in Croatia, a destiny which on some level affects Croatian society as a whole. For me, this was the most important message of the project.

J.V.: This is, of course, not just the situation in Croatia, but is also detectable in the whole region, and even further afield. Maybe, to contextualize this specific work further it should be added that it was exhibited within the framework of an exhibition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. The other important thing is the procedure you use: you are not somebody who takes the position of the observer and represents a reality which has already happened, but instead you are trying to interact with that reality and act within the community directly affected by the problem you present, so through a newly established collectivity you can find some solutions. This is probably why your work about the department stores NAMA did not appear in its final outcome as simply a nice image in the newspapers in the cultural section or in a gallery space - a place where the elite comes and shows full understanding for the tragic destinies of others - but, here the artwork itself becomes a different medium through which it is possible to pose a socially relevant question and, outside the logic of tmedia sensationalism which is attached to the news industry. The problem of the workers striking in the media today is only ever a theme of the day, before the front pages are filled once again with something else. That is why the logic of the realization of the NAMA project is so important.
The other work we wanted to mention in this discussion is the one you realized for Manifesta in Frankfurt. This is a large art manifestation, also known as the 'European biennal', oriented towards new and innovative art practices. On the other hand, this exhibition depicts the political structure of the European Union, embodied in the hypocritic urges of 'beautiful souls' to ensure the tolerance for the Other and to sustain a kind of virtual unity and equality. A good illustration of this is Manifesta 8, currently being prepared: the chosen location is the south of Spain - the poor region of Mursia - chosen precisely because it has problems. Due to its poverty and problems it paradoxically becomes the "privileged" center of a large art manifestation. If we go directly to the heart of the matter and observe it in the concrete place, the political statement of Manifesta 8 would be: there is not enough water, there are conflicted religious and national communities, the situation is bad - let's give them contemporary art! Within European cultural policies, contemporary art is the cure for everything, just like in Belgrade, the market is considered to be the cure for everything - also for the alleged improvement of the quality of contemporary art.

Your work on Manifesta in Frankfurt is interesting exactly because it reacts on the urge for the neutralization and pacification of the political and social antagonisms these exhibitions produce. We are talking about the aspect of institutionalization of artistic practices, where contemporary art is offered as something which resolves problems or is seen as some kind of "social help" through the culture. Large art manifestations such are biennials, Manifesta or Documenta, bring something more: they represent the friendship of "the nations of the world", an institution of art where everybody appears as apparently equal and everybody can speak out, but the question of whom they are speaking to, in which way they do voice their issue and what the effects of that speech of art are still hangs in the balance. In this "international parliament", which is a metaphor applicable for these kinds of exhibitions, all contemporary artists, critics and intellectuals are put on the same plane. Their difference is observed exclusively on the plane of identity - that is their cultural difference, not their economical or social differences. These differences are usually hidden behind the folklore of multiculturalism. In Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt you tried to provoke this idealized image of the world presented by the institution of Manifesta. Your work dealt with the economical differences between the artist-participants of Manifesta and it struck directly at the core of some of the problems of dominant institutional representations of contemporary art. One of the subjects of this work is also the position of the artist from the Eastern Europe.

A.K.: The work "Artist from..." was created in 2002, since then, things have changed quite a bit. The arrival of the artist from the East to the West at the end of 1990's was still problematic. The artist enters the Western market in a specific way through the occurrance of these large exhibitions. They exist as a kind of a mould through which you pass and are reshaped in the process. The aim of that (de)forming is the comprehensibility of the final product (the work of art) to Western tastes or visual codes - which sounds better than taste, or market, or galleries, or sale, fairs… and so on… No matter how perfectly clearly you can see it in the beginning, in the end it is that. I only dealt with this problem twice in my work: the work for Manifesta 4 was the first one, and the other was the work/guide the "NEW YORK ART SCENE FOR DUMMIES". Dummies are small guides, such as for example "how to become a gardner in 10 minutes", or ... a cook, or a buddhist..and so on.. a classical capitalist offer: you can do anything, only if.... I wanted to make a dummy guide for the New York art scene using the same principle - the "how to" in this case being "how somebody from Eastern Europe can become successfull in New York in 10 minutes". Of course, from a cynical distance: if you are under 25, white, male, all the better also protestant, rich and enrolled at Columbia University on an MA course, etc. Nobody wanted to print that, which is understandable. I carried out video research concerning this during two months I spent in New York.

So, the work "Artist form.." for Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt came before this work. The starting point was my first visit to Frankfurt to make arrangements for the exhibition. It struck me how much money had been set aside to be spent on the exhibition, and how it was "bragged" about it in the media and, adding to that the budget of Documenta 11, where I had also participated that year, which had an even larger budget, it became very clear the story about the money was a pretty important factor. All that money doesn't go to the artists as the authors of those works. For example, an author's fee on Manifesta 4 was 250 Euros, which is by all measures really quite a ridiculous amount. Documenta was a slightly different story, there was no fee, but there was a budget for production, from which, if you were to spend rationally, you could get a more decent author's fee. Of course, it is a completely different story if you are coming from the West (I am talking about the year 2002); let's say you might have a gallery which takes care of your participation payments at important international exhibitions, you can sell your work or you have the opportunity get a fellowship from your state.

So, on the one hand, there is all this money which is constantly being talked about, and on the other hand there is that old story about how we are all equal at the exhibitions, how the West is opening up to the East, there are no differences, etc. Yes, I thought, for those five days in that lovely hotel in Frankfurt that we were all equal in a way, but when I go home to Croatia, or as an Albanian to Albania, or a Macedonian to Macedonia, there remains ino trace of that "equality". The gallerist in the West "waits" for the Western artist, he will sell his work produced and exhibited at Manifesta or Documenta, maybe even before the opening of the exhibition, but nothing awaits me or my Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian colleagues. We will put our work under the bed or in the closet and the story ends there. Maybe we get an article in the local press, some presentation, or by chance an invitation to participate in another poorly paid exhibition.

Those were the reasons I suggested this work. I have to admit, at the start the work wasn't accepted with much enthusiasm by the exhibition curators. Why? Because in my work, the participants were the artists who took part in Manifesta that year, and according to my plan, every poster should have a label stating from which country the artist originates, for example "Artist from Albania" or "Artist from Norway", etc. The orgnaizers didn't like the fact that I wanted to sign the countries we came from, because allegedly within the exhibition "we are all equal, there are no nations". However, after a amount of some serious persuasion, I managed to explain that I saw things in a different way and we were all "equals" I had the right to a comment of my own.

I realized the work by sending a questionnaire to all the participants of Manifesta 4. I created the form with the colloboration of an artist from Frankfurt. I took my colleagues as the target group because they had been selected by the curators of the exhibition as "young up and coming European artists". The form was simple, our aim was to estimate how much the annual income of each individual artist was made from his/her art activity. We didn't consider teaching, work as designers, writers, etc. as their art activity. It is interesting to observe who answered this questionaire and in which way. The work consisted of posters, similar to the work about NAMA. Every artist who answered to my questionaire, and agreed to photographed, got his/her poster.

On the poster was noted from which country the artist came, how much he/she earned last year from art, and what their average income was in that country. That way on the poster we compared the earning of an artist and the amount of money needed for living in his/her country, because naturally in Norway you have to spend much more money than in Croatia for the same standard. The posters were placed in the streets before the exhibition Manifesta 4 was opened. I wanted the posters to be "a kind" of advertisement for the exhibition. From far away, you could see the sign Manifesta 4, and when you approach to see when and where the exhibition takes place, you don't get any other information beside the one that, for example, the Norwegian participant had earned 4.220 Euros in 2001, and average amount needed for one year living in Norway is 26.000 Euros. The participant from Croatia earned 100 Euros, and he needs 5.700 Euros yearly for an "average" life.
On the one hand, I wanted to show what different (im)possibilities we all live in, and on the other, that even artists who live in Western Europe and already have a career behind them are still not nearly at the stage of earning even an average salary in their countries. To sum up, the statistics were defeating: out of 76 artists, only 16 answered the questionnaire. Out of 18 women and 60 men, 8 women and 8 men answered. There were 26 people from Eastern Europe, 52 from Western Europe, which was the basis for our conclusion that the exhibition was "predicted above all for men from the West, and women and Eastern Europe are exotic, marginal characters in this story. The other curiosity was that the questionnaire was answered mostly by women and Eastern European artists, those who felt deprived. While the Western man was busy selling his work produced in Manifesta, he wasn't interested in dealing with some kind of inequality; on the contrary, in conversation with them I felt a pretty "cold" atmosphere.
J.V. It seems to me that Manifesta hasn't changed much; it is just that the problem is more visible than it was at the start. Manifesta is the biennal of European art and presents artists from Eastern Europe as it should according to current European politics. Also, the same thing can be seen in the museums and galleries of modern and contemporary art in the West. According to my research, although I haven't made a project out of this and I don't have such convincing statistical data like you, Eastern European artists can appear in museums only as dissidents, no matter what their original intentions were and the context of their work.

A.K.: Yes, as long as it supports somebody's thesis about the East, the artist from Eastern Europe can participate more easily at some significant exhibition or a significant art collection.

J.V.: What we can conclude at the end of this conversation and before we show the videos, is that you rarely deal with the problem of identity in the way that the problem was present in the art of the nineties, but rather you are interested in the causes and effects. In this case, naturally, the subject is the war of the nineties and the "Reconstructions" are, to my knowledge, your first documentary videos. In these videos it is interesting that the war appears only as an allusion or a premonition, while the image and the story are at the first sight connected to something else. The position from which you reveal it is opposite to the position of the documentary's testimony. In the economy of truth, image plays an important role, just as the position of the witness does. In the Reconstructions… videos, the custodian of the castle appears in the role of the witness, but the narration of the film, just as with the very visual presentation, avoids to show the wars of the nineties in any way. While contemporary media - television and the internet - function by producing "spectacular' images of the war, here those images are avoided.
War is only a premonition coming from the space of "normality", here it is presented through the everyday life of high profile political officials. The statements we had the opportunity to hear so often in the nineties are interesting: that war came as a natural urge, and not as a product of certain politics; that it was something close to human nature and NOT something constructed through with the use of media apparatus for example and other political instruments, and, finally, with the support of the general will of the people who took the side of certain politics. According to these statements, in their conspirative variants, the responsablity for the war in the nineties is not to be found in the "people" or the political nomenclature of the time, but it was Tito and the political elite of Socialist Yugoslavia who were found guilty, and who kept the nations in a political prison, in a sort of unnatural and authoritarian coalition. Nothing of those things appear in your videos, at least not in a direct way. In that sense your approach to the documentarism is interesting, being based on a string of allusions and implications, on some kind of atmosphere rather than on the presenting of the events themselves through the narrative testimonies and visual material displayed.

In that sense, I would mention another thing before the screening of Reconstructions…, something which could be interesting for this approach to documentary presentation in contemporary art, but also for the universal problem of the contemporary distribution of image which tends to present a certain reality.

In his text "The Fate of Art in Times of Terror", Boris Groys wrote about the competition between artist and terrorist in the representation of the reality of war. The central thesis of this text is that terrorists and warriors start to act as artists, like fast and effective producers of images who make events relevant by presenting/portraying them. We will finish with a quotation from a text: "While in the old times the artist had the power to testify a "heroic action" and to inscribe it in the memory of humanity, today every act of terror or act of war becomes momentarily registered, represented, described, portrayed, told and interpreted by the media: pushing a button which makes the bomb explode, a contemporary warrior or terrorist pushes the button which starts the media machinery."

A.K.: Yes, the history of the castle is the following: Tikveš castle was built in the hunting area of Kopacki rit, ever since the Habsburg dynasty. Every September there is an organized deer hunt (today also). There were many "Tito's castles", but he really liked to come to this one, and he used to come often. On April 15th, 1991, just for one day, in that same castle Tuđman and Milošević met. Twenty days after that meeting, war started. The narrator in the film was the castle custodian in the period from 1978-1991, after which the castle was closed and left to ruin. In the first film we are trying together to reconstruct a day in the life of Tito spent in the castle, walking through the devastated rooms. And also the other day, the one which was important for all of us, the meeting of Tuđman and Milošević, and after the unsuccessful meeting in Karađorđevo, we also go through the time and spaces of the castle within one day.

The very gesture of the film was dictated by the conditions. Considering the fact that the castle was totally dilapidated inside, we got the key for an hour, went inside with the former host of the castle, and in the role of a voyeur we tried quickly passing through it to find out something more. The questions I asked as somebody who remembers socialist times, who remembers Tito and the importance of Tito's castles, who still remembers the aura of Tito-the king… and on the other hand I asked questions about Tudjman and Milosevic, who had also very directly shaped our lives. So, I am coming in and trying to be a voyeur in front of all of us, there are no smart political questions, I pose questions as anyone would have then, but I also pose questions like the ones that are on some reality shows, like what did they eat, how they spent their time there, where did they walk, who came to visit them.. and at the end of the film we are back at the same point we started, we don't know anything more than we knew before, about what they talked about, or what Tito, or Milosevic or Tudjman thought and what decisions they made, just like we never knew really… Actually, the gesture is the same as anyone else's would be who would run into this man for 20 minutes and record something quickly. So, I apologize here if the quality level is low…