Exhibition curators: Slađana Petrović Varagić and Miroslav Karić
The exhibition opening will take place on Friday May 14 from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Gallery – Legacy of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković respects all recommended epidemiological measures and the allowed number of visitors simultaneously present is 20.
From the starting point of Fluxus and the principle of equality of art and life, Dragana (Jovanović) Žarevac entered the world of art with a sound performance, in 1979 at the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade. Both the professional and the general audience have recognized her since the 1990s as a video artist, winner of the ZKM (Karlsruhe) award and other national awards for video works. However, her artistic practice is not exclusively related to video. Dragana Žarevac’s early Belgrade phase (1979-1988) is related to performance and consists of more than fifteen solo or in-pair performances, held in gallery spaces those that participated in establishing and promoting the Yugoslav New Art Practice – SKC Belgrade, SC Zagreb, ŠKUC Ljubljana, Collegium Artisticum Sarajevo, Biennial of Young Yugoslav Artists in Rijeka, Hamburg (Boris Nieslony’s Artists Center), Düsseldorf (Klaus Rinke’s class) and others.
Inside the heterogeneous scene of the 1980s, academically educated in the field of language, multidisciplinary musically educated, shaped by Sanskrit and Vedic grammar studies, interested in the minimal music, the work by the OHO Group and La Monte Young, surrounded by composers and technical students from the Second Generation of the SKC Gallery, Žarevac dedicated herself to the analytically structured sound performance, sound installations and composing minimal music. The uniqueness of her performances, situated in a synergistic interspace of music, language and the visuals, is reflected in the use of instruments, sound and voice, while her ideas and concepts are firmly based on the starting points of the 1960s heroic era of performance art and the aspiration to become liberated from the conservatism of the rationalist and technocratic Western culture through a return to the primordial vibrations and Eastern civilizations − ancient teachings, language and ritual.
The exhibition Expanded Presence − Embodied Archive deals with the contextualization of Dragana Žarevac’s early artistic practice in the field of performance and sound as the result of many years of research of this artist’s immaterial performative acts by following its material traces − drawings, notations, notes, scores, synopses, texts, photographs, sound and video recordings. The process of dealing with the performance archive created the need for video re-performance production, with the three early performances staged again with a time distance of four decades in the same places where the performances were originally performed (SKC Gallery, ŠKUC Gallery), this time for the eye of the camera. In addition to the early performances archive, the beginnings of the mediatization of the performances and this artist’s first video works (French tapes), the exhibition Expanded Presence − Embodied Archive also offers video re-performances that serve the constative and performative function, which meets the audience’s interest, while from the position of the author, this deeply introspective process of re-experience produces a new work of art – embodied archive in a new context.
During her forty-year artistic career, moving along the diagram of an imaginary infinite sinusoid, Dragana Žarevac continuously searches to establish the life balance. Accordingly, her exhibition in the Gallery – Legacy of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković, seeks to transform the life force of the performance − a time-based bodily and ephemeral act − into an infinite being in time.
Dragana Žarevac is a visual artist. Her exhibiting career began in 1979, with performances at the Student’s Culture Centre in Belgrade and in numerous gallery spaces in the former Yugoslavia and abroad. Her work is characterized by a personal attitude on issues of general social significance. She exhibits video works and video installations, drawings and works of sound art. She has exhibited in, among other places, the Kunsthalle – Vienna, the Tate Modern Gallery – London, the Georges Pompidou Center – Paris, ZKM – Karlsruhe, KunstWerke – Berlin, Art in General – New York and in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Belgrade. She was awarded by the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (1998), won the Golden Sphinx Award for the video opus at the Video Medeja Festival in Novi Sad (1999) and the Nadežda Petrović Memorial Gallery Award in Čačak (2005). Her work was supported by the city of Paris, the French Ministries of Culture and of Education, the Open Society Foundations, the Goethe Institute, ProHelvetia, the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, the Roberto Cimetta Fund, Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, the Secretariat for Culture of the City of Belgrade, the Film Center Serbia and others. She was a resident artist in the ZKM Centre, Karlsruhe; CICV Pierre Schaeffer, Hérimoncourt; and in Sant Antonino, Corsica. She works as a curator and a selector of video programs, international video festivals and exhibitions and as a program creator of video workshops.