The question that imposed itself during the presentation of my projects in the Art Gallery in Dubrovnik a year before the exhibition "Dubrovnik - Here and Elsewhere" (October 2002) was the relation between the public and the exhibition. For this matter, it is not about the usual relation of visitors in relation to a gallery. Dubrovnik residents experience the Art Gallery - especially the "winter exhibitions" when there are almost no tourists in town - as "theirs", both in a physical and mental sense. In this respect managing the gallery is in some ways a specific task in balancing exhibitions that are "acceptable" (under which is assumed that these are mostly old Dubrovnik masters) and exhibitions that are "different", contemporary, and altogether different from typically recognizable art forms.

There are about 800 addresses in Dubrovnik to which exhibition invitations are sent. The public is older, more conservative, some attend exhibitions regularly, some never or very rarely, and it is not uncommon to have visitors loudly comment the works being shown: "it's fantastic", or the reverse "what is this?"… The work "Commentaries" explores the relation of the public towards contemporary art immediately prior and during the exhibition "Dubrovnik - Here and Elsewhere" through 5 points:

POINT 1: QUESTIONNAIRE

Questionnaires gather information on the relation of the Art Gallery Dubrovnik public towards the gallery and its program for July 2002 to September 2003 (every exhibition can be graded with an additional commentary written in the questionnaire). Questionnaires that arrived before the exhibition (they were sent to all 800 addresses) were processed by a statistician and psychologist and together with the analysis displayed in the gallery, while questionnaires filled out during the exhibition itself were added to the already existing database.