WE: VOICES
The exhibition, using parts of the artist’s existing works, creates a unique environment with a focus on the importance of taking personal responsibility towards the people around us and the society in which we live
21.12.2023 — 31.1.2024, Modern Gallery, JU Museums and Galleries of Podgorica, Montenegro / Curators Irena Bekić and Anca Verona Mihuleț / Associate curator of the exhibition Ljiljana Karadžić, Modern Gallery
Questions regarding social responsibility and the implications of knowledge shape the ways in which we perceive visuality and contemporary exhibitions. Andreja Kulunčić has established her practice outside the norms of visuality and objectiveness – she is a close observer of the immediate reality, primarily in Croatia and the area of former Yugoslavia, with implications in the region and reflections on a global level.
The exhibition We: Voices features a stratification of recent historical events – the reverberations of WWII, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the first waves of migration into Europe, the dissolution of traditional European industries and occupations, including the recent arrival of workers from South Asia – episodes that are delicately described in the exhibition space.
The artist uses the voices of the underprivileged – workers on the margin of existence, people suffering from mental illness, migrants and illegal migrants, people of different religious, ethical, racial and sexual identities and others – to change the usual, uniform perspective of our surroundings.
Built around five stations (a newspaper narration, the zone of moving image, testimonies of female prisoners, a mental map, and a sequence of posters), the exhibition suggests how the audience might hear and see the invisible threads that make up the collective views and voices of socially underprivileged people.
The gallery thus becomes an assembly point for bodies of marginalized people, prevented from taking action by social consensus. The audience is invited to take a closer look, to listen, to collaborate with them, and take a joint risk in confronting a world in which some are privileged, while others are reduced to mere survival. In such a constellation, through common action that can even take place outside the arena of political power, a field of action is created, where each I leads to an WE.
Realization of the exhibition: Graphic design Srđa Dragović / Technical realization Neđeljko Radević and Vukić Petrović / Printing of the newspaper-catalogue daily “Dan” / Photographs of installations and conversations Filip Roganović and Ivo Martinović / Production Moderna galerija Podgorica, 2023.
The exhibition catalogue was printed in the form of a daily newspaper
