Novi Sad Contributors

Verica Barac - Kosovo and corruption
Verica Barac, born in 1955 in Cacak. Graduated from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade. She worked as a lawyer in the economy sector, and participated in the supervision and elaboration of by-laws for the local self management. Public Attorney of the Municipality of Cacak between 1997 and 2001. She was one of the leaders of the Civil Parliament of Cacak during the NATO bombing in 1999, and later one of the founders of the Civil Parliament of Serbia and its President since the foundation till May 2003 when she was appointed President of the Anti-Corruption Council of Serbia. She has prepared the Civil Parliament's book «Pravac promena» (Belgrade, 2000), as well as two publications of the reports and initiatives by the Anti-Corruption Council, «Corruption, power and state - starting point and the results by the Anti-Corruption Council (2001-2004)», («Res publica», Belgrade, 2004), and «Corruption, power, state - second part» («Res publica», Belgrade, 2005). Together with Zoran Lutovac, co-editor of the book «Fight Against Corruption in Serbia between the National Strategy and the Action Plan» («Friedrich Ebert Stiftung», Belgrade, 2006) is the chairwoman of the Anti-Corruption Committee of Serbia.

Hans Bernhard - Retro-Massmedia Shockwaves
Hans Bernhard (A/CH/USA, *1973) is a Vienna and St. Moritz based artist working in the fields of digital and fine art. Using technology, computers and the internet as a medium since 1994, he exhibited and performed in venues like the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Japan), the Ars Electronica (Austria), the Konsthall Malmoe (Sweden) or the SFMOMA (USA). He is a founding member of the legendary etoy.CORPORATION and of uebermorgen.com. He studied visual communication, digital art, art history and aesthetics in Vienna, San Diego, Pasadena and Wuppertal.

Muhamed Eljsani (aka Muha Blackstazy) - Without Title
33 years old, born and raised in Novi Sad (in Vojvodina, northern province of Serbia), in predominantly Roma neighborhood "Adice", earns for living working as a construction worker, without permanent employment. For more than 10 years, Muha writes lyrics that are very much connected with everyday life of Romma community, and turns them into hip-hop style songs. He made his first recordings in 2003: local radio (Multiradio) released the song "Crni smo mi" ("We are Black"), which attracted lots of attention of Vojvodina audience, due to its messages to fight against racial and ethnic discrimination.

Slavko Bogdanovic - Vae Victis
Slavko Bogdanovic is lawyer and conceptual artist from Novi Sad.

Thomas Campbell - Civil War (A quiet)
Thomas Campbell is a resident of Saint Petersburg and a graduate student/teacher at Yale University. His research interests include postwar and contemporary Russian art, Soviet and Russian cinema, and Petersburg counterculture. As a union activist, he has participated in three strikes and numerous actions by GESO (Graduate Employees and Students Organization) and HERE-UNITE Locals 34 and 35 (Yale University/New Haven). In Petersburg, he has been involved, as a translator, writer, and organizer, in dozens of collaborations with such art groups as the Free Culture Foundation and Chto Delat? (What Is To Be Done). He has published articles on Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Herzen and Tom Stoppard, Yevgeny Yufit, neoacademism and necrorealism, Jacques Rancière, the Russian blockbuster "Day Watch," and, most recently, the catastrophic redevelopment of Petersburg. He is also the co-author (with Igor Khadikov) of Kniga vecherinok (The Party Book, 1996, 2007).

Jovan Divjak - Na tragu mitologije
Jovan Divjak was a general in the Bosnian army during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. He was the highest ranking ethnic Serb in the army and one of its most educated and experienced officers. On April 8th, 1992, Divjak became Deputy Commander of BiH's Territorial Defense forces and a month later oversaw the defence of Sarajevo from a major JNA attack. Between 1993-1997 General Divjak was Deputy Commander of the BiH Army's Headquarters, charged with the cooperation with civilian institutions and organisations (administration, economy, health, education). Today, Divjak is the executive director of the association OGBH, "OBRAZOVANJE GRADI BIH" (Education builds Bosnia and Herzegovina). He was one of the founder of OGBH in 1994. The association’s goals are to help children who’s family were victims from the war, by providing them financial and material support.

Bojan Djordjev - Thorn
Bojan Djordjev is born 1977, in Belgrade. He is theatre director, co-founder of TkH (Walking Theory) platform and TkH journal for performing arts theory.

Volker Eick - Terrorism
Volker Eick is political scientist at the Freie Universität Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute, Department of Politics, Germany. He is currently finishing his PhD on "Neue Sicherheitskonzepte im sich wandelnden Wohlfahrtsstaat. Kommunale Kriminalpolitik zwischen Kommerzialisierung und Community" (New security concepts within the changing welfare state. Communal crime policy between commercialization and community). Most recent publications: "Neoliberalism and Urban Space: Activism, Atavism, and Aspiration". In: Estonian Architectural Review Ehituskunst", forthcoming (2008) "Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik" (Ed., with J. Sambale/Eric Töpfer), Bielefeld (2007); "Preventive Urban Discipline: Rent-a-cops and the Neoliberal Glocalization in Germany". In: Social Justice, 33/3 (2006).

Galit Eilat - Collaboration (2)
Galit Eilat is a Curator and the Founding Director of the Digital Art Lab or The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. She is Co-Editor in Chief of Maarav – an online arts and culture magazine, as well as a teacher at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Film Studies.

Albert Heta - Bang! Bang!
Albert Heta (b.1974), works as artist, designer and culture producer. His works can be often simple acts of intervention in an existing social condition, situation, or object. While the intervention is always, in turn, an insurgence of an “unofficial” existing reality, which the official condition/object/situation hides, or has simply dismissed.

Irwin - NSK GARDA
The IRWIN group was founded in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Its members are Dušan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik.IRWIN, along with the music group "Laibach" (*1980), the performance group "Gledališce Sester Scipion Nasice" (* 1983), later known as the "Kozmokineticni Kabinet Noordung", and the design department Novi Kolektivizem, comprises one of the core groups within the artists’ collective "Neue Slowenische Kunst" (NSK), established in 1984 in the Slovenian republic of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. As with the other groups within NSK, IRWIN is committed to the so-called ‘retro-principle’. This retro-principle is "not a style or an art trend but a principle of thought, a way of behaving and acting". (IRWIN) This means, to be more specific, that the visual language developed by IRWIN in the 1980s consists almost exclusively of visual elements quoted from Western and Eastern European art of the 19th and 20th centuries. IRWIN employs motifs from Socialist Realism and the art of the "Third Reich", from the various politically-engaged European avant-garde movements including German Dadaism – in particular the artist John Heartfield –, Italian Futurism and Soviet-Russian Constructivism, as well as from religious art and Slovenian art of the 19th century. These elements are then combined with the Laibach "leitmotifs": eagle, stag, sower, little drummer, and the black cross of the Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich. IRWIN assembles these motifs from such varied origins in complex and multi-layered oil paintings in heavy frames. Since its inception, the group IRWIN has been involving itself extensively with the art history of Eastern Europe in its artistic projects, in particular with the ambivalent inheritance of the historical Russian, but also southern Slavic avant-garde and its totalitarian successors, and thus with the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism. Following the creation of an individual visual language in their appropriation projects of the 1980s, the group has been concentrating since the 1990s on a critical examination of the art history of "Western Modernism", countering it with the "retro-avant-garde" of a fictive "Eastern Modernism" which, in its own obvious artificiality, points to the artificiality of Western art historical structures that continue to exclude contemporary Eastern European art to this day.

Vesna Kesic - Thanksgiving
Vesna Kesic is a journalist, feminist, pacifist. Graduated at University of Zagreb in psychology and sociology. Received her MA at The New School for Social Research with the thesis on changes in international law regarding war time rapes, after wars in Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. During the war in Croatia, she was working on deconstruction of daily political rhetoric and popular culture. Today she is a free lance journalist and social researcher.

Erden Kosova - Counter imaging
Erden Kosova is a critic and curator based in Istanbul. He contributes to two independent Istanbul-based magazines, Siyahi (post-anarchist politics) and art-ist (contemporary art) as an editor. He is also a lecturer at the Kadir Has University Istanbul.

Andreja Kuluncic - Reconstruction
Andreja Kuluncic (b.1968., lives in Zagreb Croatia) is an artist and has participated in many international exhibitions.

Geert Lovink - Digital Despair
Geert Lovink (NL/AUS) is a media theorist, net critic and author of Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks, My First Recession and Zero Comments. He is the co-founder of projects such as The Digital City, Next Five Minutes, Nettime and Fibreculture. Since 2004 he is reseach professor at Interactive Media (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) where he leads the Institute of Network Cultures and is associate professor at the Media & Culture department, University of Amsterdam.

Jean Matthee - Eating Rawness
Jean Matthee is a London based theorist, artist and filmmaker.

Sebastian Meissner - Ghetto Ambient
Klimek and Ghetto Ambient are two of the many aliases of German sound and media artist Sebastian Meissner (b. 1969), who has explored various terrains under several guises throughout his career, including Open Source, Bizz Circuits, aUTOkoNTRasT and others. He focuses on intermediate states and interstices that result from transformation processes, altering definitions, changing architectures and other small shifts and cracks that appear in or can be induced into otherwise tendentiously rigid structures.

Metahaven - Wall
Metahaven: Design Research, based in Amsterdam and Brussels, is a think tank focusing on design, visual identity and the political. Its current partners are Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden and Gon Zifroni. Meta Haven’s aim is, through design research, to re-think political potentialities in design and to generate visual-theoretical discourses around both commissioned and non-commissioned topics, resulting in projects in the area of the hypothetical and the proposal, as well as in direct action. Metahaven, in its current configuration, is functioning as a connective tissue between theoretical and visual positions. While the collective argues that new connections between design and theory are needed, at the same time it rejects that these should operate on the basis of a mutual license to restrict the other. In other words, Meta Haven argues for a design theory where the jouissance of visual imagination is allowed full space.

Suzana Milevska - Renaming Machine
Suzana Milevska (1961, Bitola, Macedonia) is a curator and visual culture theorist based in Skopje, currently working as a Lecturer in Visual Culture and the Director of the Visual and Cultural Research Centre – “Euro-Balkan” Institute. She earned her PhD in 2006 from the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College – University of London where she was teaching (2003-2005). In 2004 she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. In 2001 she won the Getty Curatorial Research Grant. In 1999 she was a curator in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (ArtsLink Grant). Her research and curatorial interests include participatory art, politically and socially engaged artists, postcolonial institutional critique, gender issues, and feminist art and culture. In 2007 she curated the the regional workshop “Curatorial Translation,” the international conference “Translating the Self,” and the summer school “Integrating Cultures/Negotiating New Subjectivities .” In 2006 she curated Hristina Ivanoska’s “Naming of the Bridge Rosa Plaveva and Nakie Bajram,” at Foundation of Women’s Art, London. In 2005 she curated the “Workers’ Club” - exhibition and conference, as one of the curators of the International Contemporary Art Biennial - National Gallery, Prague, and in 2004 she curated the Macedonian section of “Cosmopolis” – Microcosmos X Macrocosmos exhibition at State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2004 she co-curated (with Julia Schäfer) the “Unbalanced Allocation of Space,” at GFZK (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst), Leipzig, and in 2003 she curated a TV Leipzig talk-show programme “Divided Sky/Re-unified Territories,” part of Introducing Sites II, GFZK, Leipzig. She curated over 70 exhibitions in Skopje, Istanbul, Stockholm, Berlin, Bonn, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Prague, London, etc. She is a member of I.K.T. and A.I.C.A. and an International Correspondent for the Feminist Review –London, Contemporary, London, and springerin, Vienna.

Nebojsa Milikic - Collection
Nebojsa Milikic is an artist and cultural activist, Belgrade, Serbia. Organizational, artistic and curatorial practice in alternative culture; political and socially engaged artistic projects and actions; art projects and public campaigns targeting problems of urban micro communities.

Gini Müller - Performing Posses
Gini Müller (lives in Vienna), works as a dramaturg, performer and activist. January 2008: "Possen des Performativen, Theatre, Aktivismus und queere Praktiken", hrsg. Gerald Raunig/eipcp, Republicart 7, Wien, Turia+Kant. Since 2004 lectues on University of fine Arts and Department of theatre on the University of Vienna. From 2001-2005 Member of the PublixTheatreCaravan, no-racism.net since 2004: Performanceband: SV Damenkraft.

Teofil Pancic - Kljuc
Teofil Pancic is journalist and a writer. He has been editor-in-chief of 'Vreme', Serbian political magazine. He is a columnist that publishes his work in different newspapers and magazines. With his work, he tries to contribute to "complete, undisturbed freedom of public speech production, which is the most hygienic thing in the world!".

Martha Rosler - Torture terror tranquility
Martha Rosler is an artist working in video, photo-text, installation, and performance. She also writes criticism and lectures nationally and internationally. Her work on the public sphere ranges from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially housing. Her work often centers on women’s experience. Rosler has long produced works on war and the “national security climate” that predisposes to war. Her photomontage series joining images of war and domesticity, first made in relation to the war in Vietnam, has been reprised in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan. Her works on systems of travel and their associated environments, including air travel, automobile travel and urban undergrounds, further consider the landscapes of everyday life. In 2007, Rosler participated in the documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster exhibitions; her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in many other venues. A retrospective of her work was shown, in1999-2001, in five European cities and in two New York museums. In 2005, Rosler received the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, and a partial retrospective was held at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, in conjunction with this award. In 2006, Rosler received the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize, Austria’s highest fine arts award. In 2007, she received an Anonymous Was a Woman award. In 2008, she was honored by The Center for Book Arts in New York City. Rosler has published fourteen books, in several languages, and numerous essays. A book of her essays, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, was published by MIT in 2004. She Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Florian Schneider - Collaboration (1)
Florian Schneider is a writer, filmmaker and net activist. He concentrates on how new communication and migration regimes are being attacked and undermined by critics of borders and networks. Schneider is one of the initiators of the No One is Illegal campaign and one of the founders of the noborder network and the Europe-wide internet platform, D-A-S-H. In 2001 he designed and directed the make world festival in Munich, and organised metabolics, a series of lectures on net art and net culture. He has also worked on several documentaries for the German-French television station, Arte, including What's to be done? which looks at contemporary activism. He also writes for major German newspapers, magazines, journals and handbooks.

Zelimir Zilnik - National Mythomania
Zelimir Zilnik (born 1942, based in Novi Sad, Serbia) From the late 60s, his socially engaged films and documentaries in former Yugoslavia and his unique visual style earned him critical accolade (The Unemployed, 1968, Best Documentary at the Oberhausen festival, 1968; Early Works,1969, Best Film at Berlin Film Festival), but also censorship in the 70s for his unflinching criticism of the government apparatus. Low budget filmmaking and challenging political themes mark Zilnik’s prolific career that includes over 40 feature and documentary films and shorts. Since the 1980s, he has been developing his unique docu-drama language, which he used throughout 1990s to reflect on political tensions, including EU sanctions, the NATO bombings, and Milosevic’s regime. His power to observe and unleash compelling narratives out of the lives of ordinary people is the common thread throughout his documentary and docu-drama work, including 1994’s Tito's Second Time Amongst the Serbs. More recently, his focus has shifted beyond the divided Balkans to question its relationship with the tightening controls of European borders, delving into the heart of issues of refugees and migrants in Fortress Europe (2000), Kenedi Goes back Home (2003), Kenedi: Lost and Found (2005) and Europe Next Door (2005).

Program Novi Sad

Dictionary of War - PROGRAM

Fifth edition of the Dictionary of War in Novi Sad starts on January 25 and continues on 26, 2008. Another 25 concepts will be presented in Studio M, Radio Novi Sad, Ignjata Pavlasa 3, Novi Sad.

Please note that the timetable is remains subject to change, but this website will be updated as soon as changes occur:

FRIDAY, January 25th, 2008, from 17:00 to 22:00

17:00 Exergue / Florian Schneider
17:30 Bang! Bang! / Albert Heta
18:00 (A Quiet) Civil War / Thomas Campbell
18:30 Collaboration / Galit Eilat
19:00 Collection / Nebojša Milikić
19:30 Counter-imaging / Erden Kosova
20:00 Digital Despair / Geert Lovink
20:30 Ključ / Teofil Pančić
21:00 Kosovo i korupcija / Verica Barać
21:30 Late Night Ghetto Ambient / Sebastian Meissner

SATURDAY, January 26th, 2008, from 14:00 to 22:00

14:00 Nacionalistička mitomanija / Želimir Žilnik
14:30 Na tragu mitologije / Jovan Divjak
15.00 NSK GARDA / IRWIN
15:30 Performing Posses / Gini Müller
16:00 Rawness-Eating / Jean Mathee
16:30 Reconstruction / Andreja Kuluncic
17:00 Renaming machine / Suzana Milevska
17:30 Retro-Massmedia Shockwaves & Human Membranes - Kenya 2008 / Hans Bernhard
18:00 “Terrorism” - too smart to be defined / Volker Eick
18:30 Thanksgiving / Vesna Kesić
19:00 THORN – practical human nature / Bojan Djordjev
19:30 Torture, terror, tranquility / Martha Rosler
20:00 Vae Victis / Slavko Bogdanović
20:30 Wall / Metahaven
21:00 Without Title / Muha Blackstazy

DICTIONARY OF WAR - Novi Sad edition: January 25 and 26, 2008

After a one year break the DICTIONARY OF WAR continues with a fifth edition on January 25th and 26th, 2008 in Novi Sad, Serbia. Again 25 new concepts on the topic of war will be presented in alphabetical order by artists, theorists, filmmakers, scientists, researchers. Loosely based on the slogan: "At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something" DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating concepts.

The Novi Sad edition of DICTIONARY OF WAR will feature contributions by: Verica Barac, chairwoman of the Anti-Corruption Committee in Serbia; artist Hans Bernhard from Austria; Novi Sad based artist Slavko Bogdanovic; Thomas Campbell, union activist and writer from US and St. Petersburg; Jovan Divjak, former general in Yugoslav army who defended Sarajevo; Bojan Djordjev, theater director from Belgrade; political scientist Volker Eick from Berlin; Galit Eilat, curator and theorist from Israel; artist from Kosovo, Albert Heta; IRWIN group from Ljubljana; Vesna Kesic, feminist and journalist from Zagreb; Erden Kosova, critic and theorist from Istanbul; artist from Zagreb Andreja Kuluncic; Geert Lovink, media theorist from Amsterdam; London based artist an filmmaker Jean Mathee; sound artist from Berlin Sebastian Meissner; Metahaven, design group rom Amsterdam and Bruxelles; visual art theorist from Skopje Suzana Milevska; Nebojsa Milikic, artist and activist from Belgrade; theater theorist and performing artist Gini Mueller; Martha Rosler, artist from New York; Florian Schneider, filmmaker and activist from Munich; Paris based theater playwriter Biljana Srbljanovic; Teofil Pancic, journalist and writer from Belgrade; Zelimir Zilnik, filmmaker from Novi Sad.

This winter, DICTIONARY OF WAR event will take place in Serbia where notion of war has a special meaning as a symbol of unresolved past, which in many ways determines the future of the territory of former Yugoslavia and its neighborhood – it is constituting form of a new order. To question different approaches to the subject of a war in this special edition of DICTIONARY OF WAR in Novi Sad has significant roll in analyzing present “power relations” in this specific region and wider. “Is genocidal war necessary for the organization of human society?” still reverberates through this region.

The DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an “analyzer of power relations” that constitutes current changes. Changes that have been producing ever new wordings: The new war, post-modern war, global war, immanent war - all sorts of labels that indicate that the juridical model of sovereignty would seem to have had its day: war as an armed confrontation between sovereign nation states is a thing of the past. While this still refers to conflict between different interest groups that are defined by the degree of their intensity and extension, unlike in the past war serves to regulate rather than destroy or renew existing power relations.

100 concepts on the issue of a war, have had already been invented, arranged and presented at the first four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The entire video recordings (live mixed from four cameras and additional sources) of the first four editions of the DICTIONARY OF WAR are available for free download from the website: http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/v2v
Besides that, in the lobby of the location of Novi Sad event, there will be TV sets installed offering to the audience the opportunity to browse through this unique topic-based multimedia archive that encompasses more than 50 hours of video material. Even by now the video files of the DICTIONARY OF WAR are shared by thousands of users worldwide who download the material for educational or research purposes and remix it in various new contexts. The next 25 concepts that are going to be presented at the Novi Sad edition will be ready for download near on real time - published under a creative commons share-alike license.

The Novi Sad edition of the DICTIONARY OF WAR starts on Friday, January 25, at 5 pm in Studio M, Radio Novi Sad, Ignjata Pavlasa 3. It will be continued on January 26, at 2 pm. The concepts will be introduced in alphabetical order by their concept persons in half-hour long presentations or performances. Entrance to the event is free of charge.

More informations at: http://dictionaryofwar.org or info[at]dictionaryofwar.org and office[at]kuda.org

DICTIONARY OF WAR is project by Multitude e.V. Berlin and Unfriendly Takeover Frankfurt am Main, and it is locally organized by New Media Center_kuda.org Novi Sad (www.kuda.org) in collaboration with “Zavod za kulturu Vojvodine” and Radio Novi Sad.

The project in Serbia is supported by Ministry of Culture and Education of Province Vojvodina, Fond for Open Society, Goethe Institute Belgrad, Austrian Cultural Forum Belgrade and The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Belgrade.

Images from Novi Sad Edition

Musslin Screen Projection

Exergue by Florian Schneider

Projection onto the Buildung

Projection onto the Buildung from below

Presentation of the Archive

Presentation of Jovan Divjak

Credits of Novi Sad Edition

The Novi Sad edition of the DICTIONARY OF WAR have been produced in a collaboration of "Multitude e.V." and "KUDA.ORG". It has been funded by the regional government of Vojvodina and produced in close collaboration with KUDA.ORG.

Curators: Annett Busch, Branka Ćurčić, Susanne Lang, Zoran Pantelić, Florian Schneider

Organization: KUDA.ORG with support of DJB e.V.

Moderation: Branka Ćurčić

Stage Building: Studio M Technical Team and DJB e.V.

Technical Setup: Sören Köhler, Florian Schneider

Video Production: Annett Busch, Gerbrand Oudenaarden, Florian Schneider