2018 — Curating Ocean Europe by Ismar Čirkinagić at Collegium artisticum, Sarajevo, in collaboration with Sanela Nuhanović.
Tijana Mišković has worked with Ismar Čirkinagić since 2008. Apart from studying together at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, they share the same cultural and linguistic background, having both arrived in Denmark as refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. This connection has been one — but not the only — motivation for the curating of Čirkinagić’s first solo exhibition in his homeland, based on the series Ocean Europe.
In-between-cultures reading of Ocean Europe
The series Ocean Europe was originally created in 2016 in connection with Ismar Čirkinagić’s solo exhibition at Esbjerg Art Museum, where Tijana Mišković was a co-curator. The exhibition has since been nominated for the AICA Art Critic Prize 2017 and chosen for MAC International in Belfast, curated by Katerina Gregos, Marta Dziewańska and Hugh Mulholland. The artwork has also been mentioned in Lisbeth Bonde’s publication Danish Art in the 10s: 40 Artist Portraits.
The series consists of 50 conceptual photographic works based on the colours of European countries’ flags, which through artistic processing have become monochrome colour areas. In Photoshop, the artist calculated the average colour of each flag, converting all recognisable colour areas and forms — as well as their socially predetermined symbolism — into monochrome void monoliths. The artworks are then produced through the traditional chemical developing process on photography paper, placing the work technically within the tradition of camera-less photography.
To “clean” the flags by removing national symbols from their appearances is an artistic removal of the structures that underpin a national feeling. This transformation is inspired by a so-called oceanic feeling — a short and intense psychological experience where an individual feels united with the world and where the boundaries of the ego are erased. It is a moment of spiritual sublimity emerged as a product of triumphal experiences of eternity, in which all existential doubts are gone.
The work thus expands the understanding of belonging by confronting the concept of constructed national feeling — symbolically binding us to a demarcated country — with an open and universal sense of belonging.
The artist says: “In time of crisis, when stratification of society is accompanied by decadence manifested through media and consumerism, and where xenophobia and Islamophobia are not marginal phenomena but political mainstream, the flags are nothing more than primitive objects for accumulation of national patriotic feelings and as such used by the elite for cultivation of narrow-minded and primitive points of view on a far wider and more complex world condition that surrounds us. This process of ‘spiritual purification’, which extends in the existing political constellations, carries in its own way a seed of anarchist thought.”
By questioning the nation-state concept, the work opens up significant topics such as the notion of borders, ethnicity, and religion — all of which have a direct connotation to the Balkan civil war in the 1990s. It seems both meaningful and important to present this exhibition in Sarajevo to an audience whose lives have been so influenced by mechanisms governed by exactly these nationalist polarisations.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has unfortunately still not found a functional governmental system. The Dayton Peace Agreement, introduced as a solution to stop the war, has become a permanent state of stagnation where the two entities — the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska — present incompatible visions for the country. As Sead Alihodzić from International IDEA explains: “The priority of ‘ethnic principles’ over ‘democratic principles’ is not sustainable over a long time period. It inevitably leads to renewed conflicts because it favours ethnic parties, which generate tensions and keep them high in order to remain relevant. ‘Ethnocracy’, as the Bosnian system is sometimes described, may be the settlement to end the war, but its positive effects were short-lived as it soon started to feed the conflicts on which ethnic parties rely in their struggle for power.”
Comparing the reception of the audience in the two countries where Čirkinagić lives is of significant relevance, since the artist’s practice exactly deals with the cultural and ideological translations created in his being between two cultures.
Poetic Anarchism
During the first couple of exhibitions, the concept of Ocean Europe started to expand and new references to anarchist thinking were drawn. The pivotal point for comparison with anarchism was the artist’s elimination of national symbols from the flags — which, apart from being an aesthetic gesture, also alludes to a poetic critique of the notion of state. Čirkinagić’s poetic and nihilistic artistic act does not only introduce us to anti-authoritarian waters but makes us question the legitimacy of the sociopolitical structures represented by the flags — the state itself.
Anarchism can, in short, be described as the social doctrine based on the renouncement of the state mechanism by removing the notion of property and authority. These three concepts — property, authority and freedom — can play a role in the understanding of Čirkinagić’s conceptual approach to Ocean Europe. Some fragments from The Anarchist Doctrine Accessible to All (1925) by José Oiticica highlight the connection:
This right to the monopoly of land obtained through purchase, heritage, donation, war, etc., seems natural and just to us, because we have been used to it for thousands of years. However, we can easily evaluate the monstrosity that this entails: the sun, the air, the rain, and the sea are natural gifts and nobody has the right to appropriate them to exploit another person. Land is also a natural gift and nobody should appropriate or dismember it in order to exploit the work of another. This fundamental injustice has converted the economic regime into a paradox: the less you work the more you have, or the more you work the less you have.
Authority has a double purpose: to defend proprietors against non-proprietors, and to regulate competition amongst proprietors. In a society without private property there are no proprietors, so there is no need for a department to defend them. The double purpose of authority disappears, and so authority and State also vanish.
Freedom allows people a possibility for awakening and developing all their abilities and capacities without fear, restriction or frustration. Anarchism understands freedom as a public heritage, as necessary to human development as light or the air we breathe.
Seeing Ocean Europe through the lens of anarchist thought cast a new light on this conceptual artwork. Suddenly Čirkinagić’s monochromes became amorphous and leaderless flags of humanity, symbolising openness and freedom. His artistic vision of belonging — based on universal human values rather than the constructed national one — connects to a scepticism towards the nation-state structure, probably provoked by the artist’s own experience of loss of a home country and the deconstruction of Yugoslavia.
Collegium artisticum Sarajevo as a Platform
The exhibition venue in Sarajevo has historically been very important for the Yugoslav art scene and still functions today as one of the significant places for contemporary art in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was founded by an avant-garde artist group active in Sarajevo from 1939 — a group of young intellectuals who had returned from universities in other European countries, whose mission was to warn about fascism by promoting multiculturalism through exhibitions, concerts and theatre performances.
As Dr. Mirjam Rajner explains: “Faced at home with an atmosphere of despair caused by poverty and political stagnation, and acutely aware of the dangers that the spread of Fascism and Nazism meant for liberal-minded Europeans, they formed a ‘synthetic theater’ named Collegium Artisticum, united music, pantomime, architecture, painting, film, drama and poetry. In addition, the members organised exhibitions and held public lectures, all of which were meant to raise awareness of the upcoming danger and offer solutions steeped in anti-Fascism, leftism and communism.”
The history of the venue is highly relevant in conjunction with the curating of Ocean Europe, because it confirms the artistic need to think beyond constructed nationalist structures. It is also interesting that the initiative for such a movement was taken by artists who had been abroad and returned to Sarajevo with new perspectives and a multicultural view of the world — a diasporic position that also characterises Čirkinagić.
Finally, the exhibition fits very well with Collegium artisticum‘s architecture — more than 50 metres of unbroken wall space — allowing all approximately 50 works from the series to be visible at once, which is of great importance to an exhibition based on both visual and physical total experience.
About the Artist
Ismar Čirkinagić (BiH/DK, b. 1973) has lived in Denmark since 1992 and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2006. He has exhibited at the Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast; HEART Contemporary Art Museum; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg. He has also participated in ARoS Triennale, Liverpool Biennial / City States, and Socle Du Monde Biennial. His works are part of collections at ARoS Museum and the National Museum of Photography in Denmark. www.ismarc.com
Installation views from previous exhibitions of Ocean Europe, respectively at Esbjerg Art Museum, Denmark and MAC International, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
