WAS IST KUNST? Dragoljub Raša Todosijević 28. 6. 2023 – 17. 9. 2023
Curator: Jakub Král
“Like the famous Slovenian band Laibach, his work also represents a walking of the very thin line between moral and perverse interpretations of history and contemporary global events, which are not clearly distinguishable at first glance.”
Jakub Král
Dragoljub “Raša” Todosijević (born 1945) is a Serbian artist belonging to the first generation of neo-avant-garde artists of the so-called New Art Practice of the 1970s. Together with Marina Abramović, he is one of the most prominent artists of the former Yugoslavia and today’s Serbia. The themes and strategies of Todosijević’s works from the 1970s correspond to the interests of our artists (Karel Miler, Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch) in working with their own bodies in a political sense. His later conceptual works relate to rudimentary questions of history and our relationship to ideologies in the broadest sense.
The exhibition will be conceived in the space of the Stone Bell House, the lower floor being dedicated to his earlier works from the 1970s and relating to the analogous domestic production of action art. The upper floor will focus on a selection of his watercolours (Gott liebt die Serben, Depresivna apstrakcija) and Diary, a variation of which was exhibited at the 2011 Venice Biennale, with which he won the main prize for the national pavilion. His installations will be represented by a massive work from the Gott liebt die Serben series, which consists of tables forming a giant swastika – the installation includes a performance of a communal dinner.
In its broadest framework, Todosijević’s exhibition and his lifelong artistic practice teeter on the edge of the possibilities of reading various symbols from history, from our present or from artistic practice itself. Like the famous Slovenian band Laibach, his work represents a walking of the very thin line between moral and perverse interpretations of history and contemporary global events, which are not clearly distinguishable at first glance. Just as it is difficult to orient oneself in the present time and its manifestations in global political phenomena, Todosijević’s artistic practice, which is full of semantic contradictions, offers a possible counterbalance and contradiction to the present era and makes it possible to orient oneself in it.
