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GalerijaGallery & Gallery Vodnikove Domačije Šiška, Ljubljana, Slovenia
June 16th – July 15th 2016
Exhibitors: Lidija Delić, Nina Ivanović, Sava Knežević, Isidora Krstić, Iva Kuzmanović, Nemanja Nikolić and Marija Šević
U10 is an artist collective from Belgrade. It is made up of a group of visual artists who in 2010 graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade; owing to the less-than-inspiring situation on the Belgrade art scene, they decided to self-organize. They managed to establish themselves in the international art world and – with the help of a collector – open their own gallery space, aimed at exhibiting contemporary visual art and being open to young artists.
The U10 group is not bound by a single mode of expression. They share a common generational background, joint exhibitions and cooperation, a similar way of thinking and a sense of urgency characteristic of artistically deprived environments, because a group can achieve and do much more than an individual. Each of the group members creates his or her own poetics and their works are diverse.
Each of the artworks chosen for the (Para)meters of Perception exhibition highlights one of the aspects essential to their world-view. Every exhibited artwork, even paintings, uses imagery to tell stories, which means they are classified as conceptual or so called neoconceptual art.
The Vodnikova Domačija Gallery Šiška is exhibiting artwork which follows the Gallery’s programme orientation of linking words and images, literature and the fine arts through series, form, and a linear narrative; at the same time, these works express fundamental aspects of reality faced by the Serbian artists. The theme of the exhibited book by artist Nemanja Nikolić, Panic Book, is the constant tension an individual feels when confronted with modern life. Lidija Delić is exhibiting an untitled series of images on paper which repeat with only minimal differences, as though they were pages in a book. Isidora Krstić’s installation is about exoticism which can be artificially created at any given moment; it’s about a story that at the end of the day is always written by those in power. Nina Ivanović bases her work on a reservoir of personal photographs, using it to develop a narrative about the roles each of us plays every day for the benefit of other people.
The paintings of Marija Šević at the GalerijaGallery talk about the thin line separating pleasure from destruction, while Iva Kuzmanović also uses painting to present us with a subjective narration focusing on the first erotic experience and the ways in which modernity creates the Ego. War is still very much real and finds a place in the paintings of Sava Knežević, where it seeps in not only through images, but also materials. The painter creates using only oil and asphalt.
Panic, pleasure, destruction, the influence of media reality over the subject, collective work and differences among individuals, playing roles for a stronger other, searching for the exotic, all represent themes in the Serbian story of reality, narrated by and lived by the U10 artist collective.
We invited the U10 collective to Ljubljana in order to present the most current art being created in Belgrade, but also because we are joined by a common jouissance, a belief in modern art and the search of new methods of production, presentation, and distribution of visual arts, which would better suit our panicked modernity and guarantee it contained spaces and times dedicated to art. Time, stopped in its tracks and dedicated to art, attention to content and shapes, creating places for thinking, storytelling, and above all the contact between people and art, all form the underlying reason for the exhibition of Slovene authors at Belgrade’s Art Space U10 until 19 June and the U10 collective’s Ljubljana exhibition at GalerijaGallery and the Vodnikova Domačija Gallery Šiška.
Text: Petja Grafenauer