The interactive installation called "Disappearing Wall" was located on the Plac Wolności (Freedom Square) in Poznań, Poland. It was presented to the public on the 24th of August and remained there until the 27th of August.

This installation has already appeared in other countries in the European Union, but Poznań was the first Polish city to host it. The idea to create this "disappearing wall" was born in the Goethe Institute.

The wall, situated on one of the most significant places in Poznań, was built with a wooden frame and the "bricks" were also made of wood. It was five metres wide and two metrestall. Six thousandbricks had quotes by famous writers, politicians, musicians and so on. All of them are words that people from all over Europe sent to the Goethe Institute to create this installation. The quotes are in three languages: original, Polish, and German. 

People who appeared in the square were allowed to pick a brick and take it with them home.

In Poznań, it took less than one day to make the wall disappear completely. Just the frame remained, with a see-through window, where the bricks were situated.

The wall wasn't separating anything. It was easy to pass by, and it wasn't very high. That points to the artificiality of the divisions of society, fake borders that divide not only nations but also social groups, families, or individuals. Those borders can be removed with the work of all people.

This installation can be interpreted as a metaphor of a collective effort to remove borders, break down walls. Instead of building the wall, people in a collective effort can remove bricks. They learn about the cultures of othersin the same way. A favourite line from a John Lennon song, a verse from a Goethe book, or a quote from a Virginia Woolf novel - they are not only uplifting words but also symbols of other cultures that we can learn from. A quote from Greta Thunberg also found a place on one of the bricks, reminding us that climate changes require collective actions.

The place this installation was situated is meaningful. Freedom Square is a symbolical place for the Polish fight for freedom from 1918. Here, the people of Poznańalso celebrated after World War II was over. Nowadays it is a place of meetings, Christmas fairs, concerts, but people also gatherhere to protest against the abuse of power and social injustices, in Poland and other countries.

As the installation was founded by the German Goethe Institute, the association with the Berlin Wall is obvious. The wall that for years was separating East and West was removed with the effort of individuals, over social and economic division, brick after brick.

However, in the Polish context, it created another meaning. It is also associated with the song "Walls" that became an anthem of the Polish movement "Solidarność" and is a hymn of the end of communism in Poland.

The wall disappeared very fast. It is a demonstration of disappearing borders between nations, but also between societies. Nowadays, as Poland is divided by complicated political situations, intolerance and LGBT+-phobia, this installation seems to be a significant lesson.

It is not a critical comment for the situation, but rather hopeful proof that tells us there is still a chance for a united society, that can see above divisions, that can raise above traditional narration and deconstruct it, returning a space of freedom to public places.

Nowadays the song "Walls" is sung by Belarusians during their fight for independence. It reminds us all that walls are often invisible, created as a cultural, social or economic construct and it is only with our powerthat we can remove them, brick by brick.

The presence of a frame after removing the bricks from the wall is also worth considering. It can be interpreted as a lasting possibility for a wall to appear in a public space again. It's a visual reminder that freedom is not given (or won) once and forever. Social alertness, consciousness about a current event and constant verifying of the social position of ourselves, but also others are crucial to not miss alarming signals. Freedom is a fluid state, and keeping it requires a never-ending effort by all of us.

This installation shows how important the collectiveis.It can build and break. And the walls that we are all creating don't have to be border walls, or the walls that "protect us" from the Other. The process of building can be used to build houses on ruins, to create a solid society, that has a lot in common, with many cultural differences.

 Pictures: Joanna Kasprowicz

On Thursday, August 27, at 8 pm in the BW Experience space, located at Hercegovačka 14 street, the art initiative Kvart Belgrade Waterfront and Gallery ŠTAB, with the exhibition "Svetlovidi" by Joškin Šiljan, will continue this year's exhibition season.

At Šiljan's new exhibition, the Belgrade audience will have the amazing opportunity to see the paintings, works on paper and objects, created from 2000 until today. The selected works, most of which have not been exhibited so far, show us the strength and vision that move Šiljana out of the imposed framework of naive and marginal art, placing him side by side with some of the greatest artists in the contemporary underground and contemporary art scene. Musical support at the opening will be DJ Funky Mechanic.

The exhibition will be open to visitors until September 20, 2020. The working hours of the gallery are every day from 6 pm to 10 pm.

"One thing that must be clarified from the very beginning is that Yoshkin Shiljan is not a savant. His painting far surpasses the plateau usually reached by a self-taught or naive artist. Siljan's independence from academic education does not mean that he is "primitive"; on the contrary, he is well acquainted with the language of European art brut, modernist and contemporary art, and Eastern art and philosophy. Šiljan's work is the result of two formative influences: the historical circumstances of the 1990s that introduced him to the path of expressive expression., and the philosophical teachings of the Indian philosopher Jido Krishnamurti, Zen Buddhism and Theosophy, which formed his artistic ethos. Through a Zen Buddhist koan - a paradoxical puzzle without a solution aimed at separating the mind from logical reasoning - Šiljan creates his visual language by combining automatic drawing and linguistic phrases, stories and sayings without obvious meaning, creating absurd artistic states filled with concise dis-context...” (From the text written by Alexandra Lazar, an art historian)

Yoshkin Shiljan belongs to the generation of artists who were formed on the domestic art scene in the 1990s. He is a civil engineer by vocation and an artist by birth. He has been actively involved in painting since 1987 and has been officially exhibiting since 1994. He was born in 1953 in Pirot. He lives and works in Grdelica. He is the winner of a large number of awards and recognitions and is one of the most famous and most active authors on our art scene. He has exhibited in all important gallery spaces in Serbia and the region, and his exhibition in world-famous museums and galleries makes him one of the most important internationally recognized contemporary artists from this area.

Artist's Biography

Yoshkin Shiljan belongs to the generation of artists who were formed on the domestic art scene in the 1990s. He is a civil engineer by vocation and an artist by birth. He has been actively involved in painting since 1987 and has been officially exhibiting since 1994. He was born in 1953 in Pirot. He lives and works in Grdelica. He is the winner of a large number of awards and recognitions and is one of the most famous and most active authors on our art scene. He has exhibited in all important gallery spaces in Serbia and the region, and his exhibition in world-famous museums and galleries makes him one of the most important internationally recognized contemporary artists from this area.

He is a participant in a large number of solo and group exhibitions, art colonies and residential programs in the country and abroad. His works are in significant museum and private collections.

He has won several significant awards, including Golden Palette - award for painting at the spring exhibition of ULUS (2006), Grand Prize of the 14th Biennial of Naive and Marginal Art (2009), Main Award for Painting on Paper OSTEN (2016), Golden OSTEN for drawing (2018), etc.

"That pain can be false, we see throughout human history...", says the artist.

The paintings on the canvas of Simonida Rajčević draw us into the antagonism of the meaning of the aesthetic as an operative, but also an unstable concept in art today, especially contemporary art. A state of human calmness or indulgence around when the images from the previous cycle Strange Waves were created , in the new exhibition False Pain grows into a state of vulnerability. Through canonized artistic scenes of committed violence that testify to the history of human brutality, the archetypal pain is there to move the body that does not react and the victim that gives up. This distance from the usual manifestations of affective experience in the world we live in or the suspension of our own sensory experiences due to the experience of something that carries with it the potential of general or common represent the notion of aesthetics in its ancient meaning of human experience. However, what prevents such an aesthetic experience from being realized through the liberating experience of a common understanding of the world is precisely the lie that introduces antagonism into the contemporary meaning of the concept of the aesthetic .

What, in fact, is false in the painful awakening of humanity through the painted scenes of tortured parts of the human body? Are they individual, alienated experiences of pain or a collective notion of what that pain is? Or is it false what pain should bring us through art? Can pain at all give us the pleasure of liberation through tragedy as Aristotle claims as the highest art form that brings catharsis? Or perhaps this catharsis has over time become an affective lie that speaks not of experiencing social and political reality, but of one’s own, escapist uneasiness within it?

In front of us are images through which the sacred scenes of martyrdom from the past are sensed and overlap with the bright colors and dominantly present human outlines of the bodies of the present time. Through the universal body of the white modern man, the outlines of the tortured bodies of El Greco's Jesus (on the canvas of the Holy Trinity ) and Saint Sebastian, Caravaggio's severed head of Goliath ( David with Goliath's head ) and the nailed hand of St. Peter ( Crucifixion of St. Peter ) are copied . Zurbaran 's scene of Jesus as the Lamb of God ( Agnus Dei), which takes on all human sins, appears on a canvas on which the universal male body - as opposed to Jesus' zoomorphic, laid-back and passive body - is coded differently. In this painting, the last in the cycle, we see hands ready to fight, to defend the victim, hands that, in the end, lead us to Bruce Lee, the invincible icon of 20th century pop culture. The layered meanings of these images live their historicization through pain that emerges over and over again as a palimpsest, transforming archetypal violence into mechanisms of world domination.

Scenes of universal suffering, suffering and pain of humanity that alternately fade and then re-emerge from the past in times of crisis, conflict and war, appear in Simonida Rajčević's paintings in fragments, like metonymic images and relationships through which a logical connection with the suffering of modern man in the global neocolonial capitalism. The body of today's homo econimicus-and which itself produces systemic products is driven by bright and fluorescent colors, historical narratives of suffering and its own vulnerability in the world in which it lives alienated. Stopped at the moment of twitching, the dominant body of today becomes an aggressive means of manipulating and managing pain. In the universal coding of pain, today's global society has also emerged, which exploits, punishes, dehumanizes, and also consistently implements violence against what deviates from its perfect uniform image of the world. The fragmented structure of the body that awakens and reassembles, in other words, says that our global civilization has always been and still is: Eurocentric, white, Christian and patriarchal. Built and disciplined through the repetitive renewal of violence, this civilization indicates to us the impossibility of erasing the basic.

Within the exhibition, there is also an oversized sculpture of Bruce Left's fighting hands, which indicates the ambient exceeding of the two-dimensional space of the painting, but also its meaning through the fiction of ultimate strength and uncompromising struggle. In a slightly different position than in the picture, the arms are placed in zero degree of both attack and defense. With these hands, identification from any position is possible, because victory over the ultimate evil is not in question, so attack and defense are allowed. However, it is clear that this iconic figure of Bruce Lee was created in the sphere of pop culture, which was built, like the previous ones, by the same structural mechanisms of a colonizing or globalizing society.

Transmitting or delegating one's own pleasure in overcoming violence to fiction, mass culture, or objects speaks to an interpassive experience of freedom that is actually false, as is the pain with which we identify before the very act of victory. The embodied sensuality, the state of vulnerability, and the feeling of pain are left, in that way, to the interpassive experience of the world, which in this case is aware of its lies. However, new aesthetic potential of images depicting parts of tortured humans but animal bodies can be seen in that consciousness. If we can imagine that potential, a hybrid figuration of a completely different monstrous body will show us - as Rosi Braidotti puts it. which, in its continuous vulnerability, torture, and oppression, offers resistance and fights for the emergence of new materialist cartography of a better world. The question that the exhibition leaves us with is: Can we even imagine that world with some other, from the perspective of a global man, 'monstrous' body that offers us other, perhaps real emotions outside the existing global archetypes of today's civilization?

Here you can read the interview with the artist about this unique exhibition:

https://www.blic.rs/kultura/ako-me-lazes-boris-se-za-golu-egzistenciju-izlozba-lazni-bol-simonide-rajcevic-u/gn3zvqg

Here you can visit the virtual exhibition:

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=b2Z6XKGAJfM

Opening date: 6th August 2020
Closing date: 27th August 2020
Location: Kulturni Centar Beogara (Belgrade's Cultural Centre), Trg Republike 5 /  Kneza Mihaila 6, Belgrade (Serbia)

Realized in cooperation with the Cervantes Institute and the Belgrade Photo Month Festival, this exhibition re-examines human memory, individual and collective memory, in an original way, through works that bring an interesting overview of important historical events.

Photographer Fernando Bayona immersed himself in the rich funds of the photographic archive of the daily ABC for the project "Deceptiveness of Memory", whose curator is Javier Diaz-Guardiola.

Obsessed with the idea of ​​failure, his goal was to connect the analytical and scientific way in which an archive manages memories, with a more chaotic and subjective form of human memory. For the artist, the way we remember and present events in the present leads to their overlap and the creation of a distorted image.

"This is a series of works in which I try to make the audience think about the dangers of forgetting catastrophic events with the intention of preventing their recurrence," states Bayona.

The works made by this photographer are created from the superposition of hundreds of original photographs from archives that have a specific concept as their theme (violence, explosion, refugees, fire čije), whose boundaries also overlap with the end result.

Each of the works is illustrated with an original photograph from the ABC collection, which shows some of the important events from the last century that influenced the evolution of man (from the First and Second World Wars to the Spanish Civil War, September 11 or the arrival of man on the moon).

Wanting to confirm the idea that history repeats itself and that our memory is weak, Bayon completes each diptych with a portrait of individuals who still suffer the injustices that this project points to.

(Due to the current situation, there will be no official opening of the exhibition, and the audience will be able to see "The Variety of Memory" from Thursday, July 2.)

The gallery of the Institute Cervantes is open on weekdays from 8 am to 6:30 pm, and the maximum number of visitors who can see the exhibition at the same time is limited to eight. In accordance with the recommendations of the Government of Serbia regarding health and safety, visitors to the gallery are asked to keep a distance of two meters in relation to other visitors, with the obligatory wearing of masks.

If the epidemiological situation allows it, the Spanish photographer will hang out with the Belgrade audience before the closing of the exhibition, on September 10. Until then, the audience will be able to hear more about the authoring process and the exhibited works in a virtual meeting on July 9 at 5 pm, whose actors will be Fernando Bayona and David Pužado, the founder of the Belgrade Photo Month festival.

(More information about this meeting, as well as about the exhibition itself, can be found on the websites belgrado.cervantes.es and belgradephotomonth.org )

"I would like to organize a meeting with all interested parties so that I can personally explain to them the specific characteristics of this project, both at the historical and technical and aesthetic level, but also the ways in which the full conceptual potential of works can be understood using mobile phones and similar devices, "Bayona said: "This is the first time that I am exhibiting my works in Serbia, and it is a solo exhibition, which is why this is a particularly emotional moment for me. In addition, I feel a great responsibility for presenting the exhibition in the gallery of the Cervantes Institute, bearing in mind the importance of this space for the promotion of Spanish culture. "

This exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Cervantes Institute in Belgrade and the Belgrade Photo Month Festival with the great support of the Spanish Agency for the Promotion of Culture (Acción Cultural Española) through the PICE program for the international promotion of Spanish culture through the mobilization of artists.

Fernando Bajona (Linares, 1980)

He lives and works on the route between Madrid, Malaga and Granada. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Granada, and obtained a master's degree in photography from the NABA University in Milan, among other diplomas and studies in educational centers around the world. His works have been exhibited in numerous art centers in Miami, New York, Buenos Aires, Brussels, Berlin, Milan, Rome, Venice, Osaka, Tunisia, Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Valencia, Bilbao, but also at numerous art fairs such as ARCO in Madrid. , ART BASEL in Miami and MACO PHOTO in Mexico. He has won several prestigious awards and scholarships, and his works are part of many prestigious collections, such as CA2M, Unicaja & Boti Foundation in Spain, BSI Bank in Switzerland, Eberhard, FORMA (International Photography Center) and the Luciano Benetton Foundation in Italy.

He is the founder and director of Studio Bayon, which deals with the production of photography and communications. He did marketing campaigns for BSI Bank, as well as a tourism campaign for the Canary Islands government. In addition to being a very prolific creator, Fernando Bayona is also a professor at the University of Granada as well as at the Graduate School of Design in Granada. He is the director of the EmerGenT residency and production program in Torremolinos, Spain.

Photo via Institut Servantes

Additional comments: Admission free. The number of visitors is limited to a maximum of eight. In accordance with the recommendations of the Government of Serbia regarding health and safety, please maintain a distance of two meters in relation to other visitors, as well as to allow passage to the entrance to the building.

Date: from 03/07/2020 to 10/09/2020

Gallery opening hours: weekdays 8 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.

Location: Institut Cervantes, Instituto Cervantes - Exhibition Hall; Cika Ljubina, 19; 11000 Belgrade ( Serbia )