Works and Lives in

The exhibition ‘Works and Lives in’ presents the works by emerging and mid career artists from the Central and South-Eastern European countries investigating the notion of place where they live and work nowadays.

Traditionally considered as home and studio, the place and its geographical location where artists create their work has become on one hand irrelevant, on the other crucial for their artistic practice. The relation between the places where they live and their practices and identities is being constantly transformed with processes like globalization as well as local preferences and trends.

The artists born in 70s. and 80s. often combine in their art many historical events and processes, biographical moments and philosophical references. These practices critically deal with cultural, social and political transition as state that describes circumstances in which they operate today.

The works offer an insight into juxtaposed poetics and politics in-between: past and present, relevant and irrelevant, intuitive and historical, local and transnational. They integrate characteristics of this state: gaps, inconsistencies, failures, inabilities, discontinuity as constitutive parts of their research and practice.

How do artists from the region located between Baltic and Mediterranean Sea function currently in the international system of the global world of art? How does the fact of being a resident of their country or migrating to the major historical and contemporary art centers affect the perspective and worldview? How does the nomadic lifestyle of the artists and the sharing economy influence their practice? An important context for the questions posed in this exhibition are the dynamic socio-political and economic changes that could be observed in the last years: exhaustion of the international political system, migration and economic crisis, the changes in the perception of the center and the old (semi) periphery after 1989, at the time when the young and middle generation of artists shaped their identity.

The ‘Works and Lives in’ exhibition presents concepts and aesthetic phenomena in the art of the selected young and middle generation artists from Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland and Slovenia.