Artists: Marijana Ćurčić, Dejan Klement, Petar Vuković, Miloš Vučićević, Aleksandar Dimitrijević and Uroš Zvizdić
Curator: Velimir Popović

The Visual Artists Association of Užice was founded in 2016. Somewhat later, the City Council made an agreement with the Visual Artists Association of Užice and the local Historical Archive to allot the building of the barracks to the association. Originally a civil initiative, whose aim was to adapt the abandoned military barracks “Četvrti puk” in Krčagovo into a space for artistic work and the presentation of the produced artworks, the association contained a certain emancipatory potential essential in an environment that had for years been plummeting into the darkness of populism.
The artist group maintained its creative activities based on the premises of the former barracks in Krčagovo, whose construction stems from the Obrenović dynasty (which ruled almost throughout the whole 19th century), and which carried the names of Stefan Nemanja, marshal Tito and the Fourth Regiment (“Četvrti puk”). In the scope of the mentioned initiatives, the gallery Reflektor was also opened as a place to exhibit artistic work, but also to provide the possibility for artists from Užice to get in touch with their colleagues. Along these lines, the works by Marijana Ćurčić, Dejan Klement, Petar Vuković, Miloš Vučićević, Aleksandar Dimitrijević and Uroš Zvizdić are shown. The exhibition is curated by Velimir Popović.
The exhibition titled “Almost Resistance” suggests two things. On one hand, that the urgency to show resistance represents an important constitutive element for an artistic work developed in the aftermath of the decline of neoliberal globalization. Namely, the act of withstanding autocratic and corporate systems as the by-products of the mentioned decline allows to be seen as criteria for constituting an aesthetic (field). On the other hand, the reduced possibility of avoiding a range of compromises questions the probability that resisting repressive social mechanisms in an artistic practice happens at all. It brings into the equation a probability that swiftly makes it a mere strategy in the hands of the oppressor, in other words, it always newly reconfigures the oppressor on a given micro-level. The notion of resistance in this case plays the role of the catalyst between the fragments of different artistic practices which are a part of the exhibition.

Text: Velimir Popović
Translation: Isidora Krstić
Photo: N. Ivanović