At Another Moment – The First International exhibition of Conceptual Art in SKC – Belgrade

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

1/8The exhibition catalog

The exhibition At Another Moment was conceptualized as curatorial translation of the temporary exhibition At the Moment, organized in the entrance of an apartment house in Frankopanska 2A, Zagreb, into a more “permanent” exhibition, taking place within the (alternative) institutional space of the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade. Ivana Bago describes the background of original exhibition in Zagreb as “the result of Braco and Nena’s travels across Europe where they became acquainted with the burgeoning new art scene. The process of organization involved sending letters of invitation to the participants. Whatever was mailed back to the organizers by those who had responded to the invitation was then exhibited. […] The exhibition included the participation of some of the best known figures of Conceptual art.”[1]

Nena Dimitrijević also reflects on the process of production of the original exhibition in her introductory text for the catalogue, published by the SKC gallery in conjunction with At Another Moment. She emphasizes the process of communication and the exchange of ideas as the main substance of the exhibition project that results in “public moment”—three hours of presentation/display in the contingently selected entrance hall of a residential house. Dimitrijević comments on the exhibition context and choice of space where the artworks were shown: “To exhibit in a noninstitutional space, almost in the street, fundamentally follows the idea of this avant-garde creation and results from the consequently conveyed thesis of the democratization of art, since, apart from the permanent gallery public, it gives the opportunity to a casual passer-by and man for whom exhibition visiting isn’t programmed in his free time, to see the show. The hall-gate of Frankopanska 2a was chosen at random and it can just as well be suddenly abandoned and the whole happening can be transferred to another place. If one insists on a location, then it becomes an institution like any other gallery with a fixed programme, (catering for) its reputation and permanent public. It wasn’t our intention. The point is that out of an almost street space, we wanted to make a center of interest and information—but not to establish it.”[2]

In Dimitrijević’s statement there is an attempt to avoid the classical functionalist position of the curator whose performance exhausts itself in the well-ordered and polite display of artworks in a “neutral” exhibition space. She abandons the “firm exhibition structure” to underline the temporality and “ephemerality” of ideas, friendship, and information circulating within the art world. Dimitrijević’s curatorial performance translates the new paradigm of Conceptual art into “conceptual exhibition practice.” In this process of translation, the curators change the name of the exhibition from At the Moment to At Another Moment—both titles can be understood as manifestations of the curatorial desire to create an exhibition structure that “captures the contemporary moment.” Dimitrijević comments on the new contextual conditions in the exhibition catalogue: “If the show At the moment by its organizational conception was the negation of the gallery […] at first glance it could seem that At Another Moment held under traditional gallery patronage means the denial of all previous theses. […] However, in this order of strictly determined organizational procedures there is an aberration which, by its apparent groundlessness and absurdity, provokes restlessness and uncertainty that normally follows every disturbance of a previously set order. This illogicality appears within the structure called the holding of an exhibition, a structure of which one of the main dispositions is either a longer or a shorter lasting period but always complete and continuous.”[3]

The curator introduces an absurd conceptual proposition in the exhibition process that plays the role of a “noise” as that which distorts the normality of the curatorial and exhibition functionalism, and is characteristic of museum and gallery spaces. Nena Dimitrijević reflects on this in her curatorial statement for the exhibition in SKC: “The show At Another Moment will last 3 times 5 whole days with intervals of one day in between. During these intervals the exhibition will be rearranged; this inapprehensible and apparently absurd proceeding, without justification within the organizational difficulties, but too regularly repeated to be accidental, is not motivated by efforts of more effective setting up and neither has its origin in the altered aesthetical motives of the ‘arranger’; each arrangement is given to another member of the technical staff of the gallery […] so that the categories of ‘taste,’ ‘professionalism,’ ‘knowledge of the works and their authors’ which are of main importance in the arrangements of most exhibitions lose all its priority in this particular case. […] A visitor is induced to find his own explanation of this organizational aberrance [sic]. In terms of art which moves creative action from the personality of artist to a receiver is adequate to transfer of the role of an arranger of the exhibition from the theoretician of art to any other person whose active participation is not limited to accomplishment of the exhibited works, but in creation of the show as a whole.”[4]

At Another Moment was important for (self-)educational processes within SKC that was based on the international exchange of experimental ideas and practices. It also had a certain formative value for the process of instituting New Art in the local context because it gathered some of the most important artists from the West, guaranteeing the relevance of that practice within the local institutional and professional environment. The exhibition is documented by representative catalogue designed by Nenad Čonkić and Braco Dimitrijević.