Olja Triaška Stefanović: YUTOPISLAVIA

We cordially invite you to the opening of the exhibition, which will take place on October 16, 2024 at 18:00 in the auditorium of the Center for Contemporary Art, Acid Coffee. Dukelských hrdinů 500/25a, Prague 7. The opening is connected with a discussion with the author

Where:

  • Opening venue:

    • in the auditorium of the Center for Contemporary Art, Acid Coffee. Dukelských hrdinů 500/25a, Prague 7, Czech Republic

  • Exhibition place: Artwall Gallery

    • nábřeží kpt. Jaroše a Edvarda Beneše, Prague, Czech Republic.

When:

  • Opening: 16/10/2024 at 18:00

  • Duration of the exhibition:

    • from 16/10/2024 to 15/1/2025

 

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*The project is part of the Photographer Festival.


Sculpture on a photo

 

About the author and the exhibition

Olja Triaška Stefanović is a photographer originally from Yugoslavia, now living in Slovakia. In her latest artistic project titled Yutopislavia, she focuses on her relationship with the past of Yugoslavia and explores the historical memory of her generation. Triaška visits and documents various places in the former Yugoslavia through photography. For the exhibition prepared for the Artwall gallery, she presents photographs from the depository of the Antun Augustinčić Museum, who was Tito’s court sculptor.

The photographs, enhanced with an effect reminiscent of artificial laboratory lighting, show unexpected compositions and fragments of statues. Soldiers, a hand holding a weapon, a horse’s torso, a naked female figure, and the famous statue of Marshal Tito appear in them. The style of the sculptures corresponds to the monumental realist sculpture of its time; Augustinčić worked from the 1930s to the 1950s. The niches in the wall where the Artwall gallery is located were created in the 1950s and are historically consistent with the exhibition’s theme. Statues originally intended for public space are thus moved from the interior of the storage to the exterior, regaining their monumental dimension.

Augustinčić, who knew Tito from the partisan movement, became an official artist after the formation of Yugoslavia, tasked with embodying political ideals in sculptural works. For the United Nations headquarters in New York, for example, he created a peace memorial in the form of a rider holding an olive branch. The utopia of Yugoslavia, which was based on ideas of spreading peace, solidarity, and coexistence of nations, ended ingloriously. It was an unfulfilled idealistic political experiment.

Olja Triaška Stefanović symbolically portrays the ideals of that time, now stored away in a depository. The relationship of contemporary people, including the artist herself, to this historical period is ambivalent. It is based more on questions than on clear answers. Yutopislavia is a country that never existed, but perhaps it could have existed in a different time and with different people. The artist says about the series: “Yutopislavia tells a deeply visual and personal story about my cultural heritage and upbringing during the Cold War, situated between East and West within the framework of the Non-Aligned Movement in the former Yugoslavia. I ask myself which aspects of Yugoslavia’s history have been forgotten or overlooked and how individuals of my generation identify with the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement.”

The relics of sculptural and ideological past in the Artwall gallery also raise questions about the nature of the present. With the decline of grand narratives in recent decades, ideals have often disappeared from political reality as well. Olja Triaška Stefanović comments on the legacy of her exhibition and the lessons from the past: “Now, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are facing new global crises and the threat of a new (hot) Cold War. It is necessary to discuss the importance of democracy, the threats posed by wars, nuclear weapons, and the dangers that dictatorships and autocratic political regimes can bring to humanity.”

 


The project is taking place with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Prague, Prague 7 District, and the State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic. The media partners of the project are Artmap, Radio 1, and GoOut. The co-organizer of the vernissage is the Foundation and Center for Contemporary Art.