Bosnians Out! (Workers without Frontiers)
The project warns about the living and working conditions of construction workers from Bosnia in Slovenia
in situ project, 23 September – 19 October 2008
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia
In collaboration with: OSMAN PEZIĆ, SAID MUJIĆ, IBRAHIM ČURIĆ // Design: Dejan Dragosavac-Ruta / Photo: Dejan Habitcht
Bosnians Out! was created at the invitation of the Modern Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art of Ljubljana which organised the exhibition Museum Road Show while building works were being executed on the building to the Museum. The artists were supposed to respond to the curators’ theme “Urban margins: parallel strategies of survival, self-organisation, migrants, workers’ hostels, prisons…” Andreja Kulunčić thus produced her work in collaboration with the very group named in the concept of the exhibition, a group of three fringe-dwellers: three building workers from Bosnia who were at that time working on the renovation of the building of the Modern Gallery, living in Slovenia while moving from accommodation to accommodation at the will of their boss, on whom their residence permits depended, without any institutional protection for their rights.
Engaging them on the project, Andreja Kulunčić involved them in the creation of the contents of the Museum on the renovation of which they were working and at the same time opened up for them a channel for communication with the public about the conditions of life of immigrant workers.
All four of them (the three working men and the woman artist) signed an author’s contract with the Museum, with equal conditions, and together worked in the rooms of the relocated Museum on devising and producing the project.
The four basic points around which the campaign was centred – conditions of work, life in the singles’ hostel, the poor food and the separation from their families, the direct and self-ironical tone and the use of their photographs in the campaign were the choices of the workers. These themes were communicated on city-light posters juxtaposing the flats that they were building, represented in a photograph of an ideal designer’s interior, and their own substandard living environment.
While the exhibition was still on, the city authorities removed the posters from the city streets, but, at the insistence of the Museum, restored them.
