Dialogue: Novi Sad // Timișoara

Selectors: Sorina Jecza (Timișoara),  Sava Stepanov (Novi Sad)

ARTISTS:

 Sanja Radusin SRB // Peter Jecza ROU

NatašaTeofilović SRB // Ioan Aurel Murean ROU

Vladimir Tatarević SRB // Ana Adam ROU

> Museum of Contemporay Art of Vojvodina, Dunavska 37

SRBIJA +

Selector: Ljiljana Tadić

Vuk Ćuk

> Gallery of Vojvodina Fine Artists Association, Bul. Mihajla Pupina 9

FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART DANUBE DIALOGUES 2020

QUO VADIS HOMO?

Novi Sad, September 2020

The eighth edition of the Festival of Contemporary Art Danube Dialogues will be held in Novi Sad from September 8th to 28th.  As in previous editions, the Festival is conceived as an overview of the most current events in the art of the Danube region (Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine).

This year, the programme is dominated by a central exhibition entitled Quo vadis homo? which was jointly conceived by Ami Barak, an independent curator from Paris, and Sava Stepanov, art critic and Art Director of the Festival of Contemporary Art Danube Dialogues in Novi Sad. The topic is imposed by the circumstances of global chaos, in which it is truly difficult to find the true backbone of sense today. Until recently, the man believed that he was on the path of constant progress, that he followed the civilization breakthrough conditioned by the progress of science and “electronics in the service of a man”. These and such expectations were not fulfilled, so the man of our time soon found himself in front of the modified characteristics of these good features turned into means of rigid control, in the middle of a restructured society in which he was re-qualified into a resource component of neoliberal capitalism. This inversion of the sense introduces a man under the wing of depression, which has become the dominant diagnosis of the state of the modern world.

At this year’s Danube Dialogues, three individual exhibitions of contemporary Serbian artists will be set up with the task of answering the same topic “Quo vadis homo?” An exhibition of works by sculptor Mića Stajčić from Belgrade, who “makes an inventory” of the painful places of our culture and modern life with a lot of critical irony, will be set up in the Bel Art Gallery. The sculptures of Veroljub Naumović, a young sculptor from Novi Sad who philosophizes on the impossibility of a modern man to overcome the fateful scope of general endangerment and alienation with surprisingly precise (hyper)realism, will be presented in the Small Art Salon of the Cultural Centre of Novi Sad. Finally, the Gallery of the Federation of Association of Fine Artists of Vojvodina (SULUV) presents the works of Vuk Ćuk, a multimedia artist from Belgrade who, with his mobile paintings and sculptures, manifests the spirit of our life in the age of invasive technicalism and general robotics and technologization in an authentic and clearly personalized way.

A meeting of artists from Timisoara-Novi Sad is planned for this year’s Danube Dialogues. It is another in a series of exhibition dialogues between the artists from Romania and Serbia, from the cities that have been named the two future European Capitals of Culture. So far, these Romanian-Serbian comparative exhibitions have given extremely interesting, even specific results, which have enabled numerous discussions and conclusions about the effectiveness of contemporary art in the post-socialist period of neighbouring countries, in the time of transition processes in society and art, and in postmodern events at the crossroads of centuries and in the circumstances of overall globalization.

The Festival is supported by the City of Novi Sad, Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information and Relations with Religious Communities, Novi Sad 2021 Foundation and Austrian Cultural Forum.