A discussion at the closing of the exhibition
The 6th triennial U3 has brought a new, unprejudiced external view on the current trends in and protagonists of contemporary art in Slovenia. It has elicited very intense response and opened a debate on artistic, critical and curatorial practices.
The role and the effects of this year’s U3 will be the subject of an open, two-part discussion.

Contemporary artistic production aiming at status of being leftist and politically articulated mainly uses two identification models. The first model is based on a description of contemporary political and economic situation, while the second is based on a prescription of a future political activity. The first, descriptionary, consists of theories of cognitive capitalism, knowledge economy, immaterial labor, precarity etc. Artists and curators identify themselves with the description of an allegedly dominant type of work in contemporary capitalism. This identification is also expected to provide a privileged epistemological position for decoding ideological patterns of actual mode of production. The prescription in question are Badiou’s and Ranciere’s theories of subject. Imagining subjectivation without prior analysis of political and economic situation and the constitution of subjects in a form of ephemeral dissent or ahistorical fidelity to an event, free from the burden of concrete post-revolutionary political struggle, where one is bound to get one’s hands dirty, allow the artists a comfortable framework for reflection of their own social position.

To open up a horizon for articulation of questions of political progressivness of artistic endeavors it is neccesary to change the angle of intervention. Problems of immaterial labor or rancierian concept of emancipatory subject demand political historization, not productive identification. What makes artistic practice political is precisely the insistence on a classical Jameson’s maxim – always historicize!

Marko Kostanić (1984) is a dramaturgist and political activist from Zagreb.

This paper will examine the extent to which some politico-cultural practices critically rupture the false binary ‘nationalist-antinationalist’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina today and go beyond the multiculturalist fascination with identitarian differences. These politico-cultural practices enact a different kind of politics, properly emancipatory, on behalf of unbribable life, by which I mean life that refuses to be bought off in the face of a politics that aims to desensitise it in relation to the workings and effects of the terror of inequality. It is a life that enacts its refusal to be bribed in its demand for and its insistence on the politics of equality for all. Who is the community mobilised by these emancipatory politico-cultural gestures? What does such a community invest its hopes in?–will be some of the questions tackled.

Damir Arsenijević is a lecturer of English language and literature at University of Tuzla.

snemanje in produkcija posnetka: Brane Zorman za projekt radioCona, CONA, 2010

Owen Hatherley: “Out of art into life”

http://www.vest.si/2010/08/01/novi-jugoslovanski-film-crna-motnja/

http://www.vest.si/2010/07/25/miklavz-komelj-fernando-pessoa-v-partizanskem-taboru/

http://www.vest.si/2010/07/18/andreja-kopac-neustrasni-ples/

Marko Jenko: “Nema priča: o telesu in vsesplošni agoniji”

http://www.vest.si/2010/07/04/marko-jenko-nema-prica-o-telesu-in-vsesplosni-agoniji/