DADADA – Mostar

Dadada

The Dadada exhibition brings together the following artists : Emmanuelle Antille, Ervin Babic, David Cousinard and Sarah Fauguet, Andrej Derkovic, Jusuf Hadzifejovic, Frank Hoppe, Adla Isanovic, Damir Niksic.
One of the rooms in the Hamman will be set apart for video artists Boris Achour, Abdelkader Benchamma, Nicolas Boone, Baptiste Debombourg, Aymeric Delhay, Aurélie Dubois, Zlatan Filipovic, Ibro Hasanovic, Barry Johnston, Argentine Lee, Laurent Mareschal, Jean-Gabriel Périot, Damir Radovic, Edo Vejselovic, Lee Wells, Virginie Yassef.

Dada. International movement born in the beginning of the 20th century which embodies the revolt of a living, irrational and free line of thought against the stale doctrines of  une raison et d’un progrés that were quintessentially illustrated in the barbarous acts of the First World War.

Dadada. Rather than a collective exhibition such as is generally expected to revolve around a central question, a stance, a theory on what brings the various artists together and what justifies the choice of their works, dadada offers a fair-exhibition-collection of contemporary art. Beyond the formalist and theoretical divide that any exhibition dogmatism tend to create, here the Affect and an anarchical conception the principle of exhibiting are strongly stated. Desire, sensitivity and seduction are claimed are the engines of the exhibition: the desire of the curator to confront the works of several artists from the 10m2 gallery in Sarajevo; assertion and liberation of the instinctual energies of the works rather than curating in a way that stifles the potential of their seductive energies by shaping them into instruments of thought, thus reducing the works and their plethora of interpretations to the mere preposterousness of a catchy pitch. In a world increasingly dominated by one single pattern of thought and where the idea of democracy in its anarchical essence is denied, art presents itself as the political space of a certain freedom, a sensitive and irrational humanity that yearns to be preserved. An art freed from theoretical discourse, as the expression of diverse ways of thinking and feeling with no arbitrary classification but the sufficient amount of haziness, a light « sfumato » that enables the imagination to be grafted onto the mind and to open up to a profusion of possibilities. It is about insisting on the autonomous character of the works, on their originalities, their presence and their individualities. It is about letting the works live on their own and above all, together, by asserting their co-existence. Co-existence of installations, videos and of the Mostar Hammam, an exhibition space that is an architectural masterpiece in itself and not just a backdrop for the exhibition. Nothing will be hung on the walls, there will be no electrical lighting other than that required for the installations or the videos to function. There will be a double timeframe for the exhibition, to suggest a return and an unsteady vision of the works and their interactions. The works can thus be appreciated through time, in this ceaseless shift between appearance and disappearance, taking shape or fading out into thin air depending on the light, mirroring the movement of destruction and reconstruction that has characterized the history of the Hammam, but also echoing the essential vulnerability of any work of art and its unceasing rebirth.

Pierre Courtin
Traduction: Robin Holmes