“Walkthrough”
Specifications: Installation of variable dimensions, HD video, b/w, stereo sound, 38’ 38’’, 2021
“Walkthrough” is a short black and white film that uses a documentary approach to record a first person speech by another artist and visionary about his project for a self-sustaining engine of contemporary art that combines a new production with a form of legacy/museum. Throughout the film, Stošić does not speak, giving completely the floor to the author he is recording. The film is therefore shot as a curatorial or artistic guidance and is a walk through an architectural object that is “conceived on the principle of a work of art” and in which each part has its own purpose. According to its author, this building is “more of a sculpture than a museum” – it combines his experience as an artist and his experience as a director of the Museum of Con temporary Art, and he describes this process as an act of activism in the field of culture.
Conceiving the museum as a meeting place, and not just as a place to store objects from the past, the author leads us from segment to segment of the architectural object, explaining their functions. One segment was dedicated to documentation of his works, followed by a library with publications and documentary materials, then with a gallery of current artistic practices of which he was the selector, as well as with a part that is a specific cultural centre where interaction between the people and the object takes place, and in which the local people become an active audience of contemporary art. As he moves through the building, we see that it is completely ruined, as well as the documentation that was in it.
As the author suffered a stroke in the meantime, the building was completely devastated. On the floor of what was a legacy/ library, we see only torn pieces of books, which he calls a conceptual work that presents the fate of art if there is no institution, and suggests that those pieces should be picked up and placed somewhere “to be a trace, not just a memory.” Despite that, aware that this object and concept are created after the end of art history, he announces that he will revitalise it again, as his health improves. According to him, it is a way to revitalise one’s own biography, which, according to him, is a way to overcome the crisis of museums and contemporary culture. With this announcement of revitalisation, “Walkthrough” ends.
Architecture in Slobodan Stošić’s film is a testimony to the at tempt to create a decentralized hybrid concept of contemporary culture that brings new dynamics to the rural environment, but also to the much wider crisis of museums and the crisis of infrastructure for contemporary art. The architecture and ruin of the internal content of the building also testify to what happens when such an initiative is undertaken by an individual without institutional support, who at some point is prevented from devoting himself to the project. Stošić’s film thus becomes a curatorial work that documents the current phase of this building, which its author himself considers to be more of a work of art than a museum.
Sonja Jankov
* The work was shown for the first time at the exhibition “Who doesn’t want to think, goes out! – Joseph Beuys & Mangelos – 100 years and art today” which was set up during August and September 2021 in the Gallery Menjačnica of the Goethe Institute in Belgrade, U10 Art Space and the New Gallery of Visual Arts (NGVU), on the occasion of the birth centenary of Joseph Beuys and Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos. The curators of the exhibition were Selman Trtovac, PhD and Ivana Bašičević Antić, PhD.