Jasmina Cibic, Anna Dasović, Doplgenger, Minna Henriksson, Daniela Ortiz
THE SOUTH IN US
8. 6.—27. 8., Likovni salon Gallery

The South in Us exhibition looks at artworks and/as ideas that consider the historical and contemporary embeddedness of Slovenia and its neighbouring countries in the global history in which, on the one hand, South-Eastern European lands and their people have been racialised as the European Other while, on the other, coloniality left a strong trace in the views on racial hierarchies here as much as anywhere else.

Works by Jasmina Cibic, Anna Dasović, the artist duo Doplgenger, Minna Henriksson and Daniela Ortiz were shown together for the first time at the 28th City of Women festival in October 2022 in Ljubljana[1], where the exhibition The South in Us presented a wider selection of artists. Additionally, the programme will also include a performance by Christian Guerematchi.

 

The East-West antagonism was a defining dichotomy for a generation of artists who experienced the disintegration of Yugoslavia and later became associated with “East Art”[2]. This politicised curatorial framing accentuated the resentment felt by artists from the former East and favoured those artistic practices that put forth the inner conflicts, political tensions, and wars they experienced during the transition to capitalism. These artists were able to enter Western art institutions if they accepted and reproduced their own exoticisation and othering – a relation that became the operational model: both a coping mechanism and a token of entry.

Starting in the 1990s and continuing well into the 2000s, this trend defined more than one generation of artists. In the late 2000s, the North-South dichotomy was added to the East-West divide. In Slovenia, interest in presenting art from or about the global South, and art created by the Southern artistic diaspora in the North, has since continued to grow.[3] In 2015, Lilijana Stepančič wrote that this interest was revived by observing recent exhibition practices of Western art institutions, not by continuing the cultural exchanges from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[4] Still, new connections arose (at least) from encounters between South American and former Yugoslavian art contexts. It wasn’t until the Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (2019) exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova that the cultural connections forged within NAM, which transgressed the East-West axis, were explored in Slovenia for the first time after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the end of Slovenia’s non-alignment. This gradual reintroduction of the South-North dichotomy complicated the discourses and relations in Southeast Europe (SEE): it opened new ways of imagining what the decolonialisation of the SEE would mean from the perspective of the arts.

In the postcolonial world, racial hierarchies reified through the colonial legacy of scientific racism continue to reign supreme. If coloniality is a mode of thinking that reproduces racial and other hierarchies, produced and/or exacerbated by colonialism, decoloniality would indicate moving beyond the paradigms of global patriarchal colonialism and its close intertwinement with modernity. As such, decolonisation is a call for questioning the ways in which knowledge, heritage and memory have been reproducing colonial and patriarchal values and enabling the endurance of hierarchies. It is a call for reimagining the world as we see it. However, a decolonial stance cannot be de-territorialised, abstracted from a specific context or universalised. On the contrary, it needs to be localised – especially in countries such as Slovenia that fail to recognise their embeddedness in the colonial past exemplified by their participation in the global colonial trade of goods, people and ideas, and their embracing of racial hierarchies.[5]

Until recently, race as the dominant term for analysing relations between colonising and colonised societies was not considered to be a relevant perspective for the study of territories that Slovenia historically constituted[6]. However, as Cedric J. Robinson writes: “Racism […] was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”[7] To this day, those “internal relations” consist of Western othering of the East, experienced by many people of the SEE diaspora who nevertheless often strongly self-identify with European whiteness and its racisms.

The exhibition title The South in Us challenges the East-West divide by playing with the platitude that connects the economic underdevelopment of the South with the self-righteousness of the North. Južnjaki [“Southerners”] as a derogatory Slovenian term for immigrants from other former Yugoslavian republics resonates with people as we travel up and down the meridian[8]: its omnipresence implies that everyone has their Southerners and everyone is someone else’s Southerner. The South in Us exhibition is an attempt to think and act from this position of difference, all the while staying aware of the greater structural inequality of those who come from further East or South, thus affirming the City of Women’s mission: not as a corrective to the cannon but as a quest to find allies for structuring the world differently – together. Or, to paraphrase Gloria Anzaldúa: those who don’t become overwhelmed by their suffering will be better equipped to observe the inequalities around them.[9]

 

Zavod Celeia – Center sodobnih umetnosti Celje, International Festival of Contemporary Arts City of Women 
Support: Mestna občina Celje
Curator: Iva Kovač
Text: Iva Kovač

 

[1] This text was first published in slightly modified version as an introduction to the program The South in Us as part of the City of Women festival.

[2] In Slovenia, the term “East Art” was epitomised by MG+MSUM’s collection Arteast 2000+ and the East Art Map, a project mapping contemporary Eastern European artists initiated by the IRWIN art collective. The subsequent promotion of the map by two prominent Western anthologies further establishment the term “East Art” as a synonym for “Eastern art”.

[3] For example, the 2009 City of Women festival, curated by Mara Vujić, focused on the Global South.

[4] Stepančič, Lilijana. 2015. “Pionirski časi: osebni spomini na prvi festival Mesto žensk”. In: Časopis za kritiko znanosti, domišljijo in novo antropologijo, v. 43, nr. 261, pp. 23–39.

[5] For some nascent research on this topic, see Mesarič, Andreja. 2022. “Racialized Performance and the Construction of Slovene Whiteness”. In: Staged Otherness: Ethnic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe, 1850–1939, Dagnosław Demski and Dominika Czarnecka (eds.). Budapest, Vienna, New York: Central European University Press, pp. 257–293.

[6] Baker, Catherine. 2018. Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester: Manchester University Press.

[7] Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. [1983]. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, p. 2.

[8] Amjahid, Mohamed. 2020. “Seehofer entscheidet immer wieder, mit seinen Worten Menschen bewusst auszuschließen”. Der Spiegel, 13. 7. 2020. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/seehofer-entscheidet-immer-wieder-mit-seinen-worten-menschen-bewusst-auszuschliessen-a-5c48e267-cf78-4731-add2-dfe99fc60ab6 [13. 9. 2022].

[9] Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

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Likovni salon Gallery / Trg celjskih knezov 9, 3000 Celje / Tuesday – Saturday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Monday and for holidays closed. entrance free