Dictionary of War
Thorn - Bojan Djordjev
Vae Victis - Slavko Bogdanovic
Prologue: you are in darkness of a public room in novi sad, serbia. it is the beginning of what is called new millennium. IMAGINE a time line emerging marking origin and development of the law concepts of war, determining destiny of individuals, nowadays we call them civilians. IMAGINE you are looking into the maelstrom of humanity & civilization, detected by a plummet hanged on your mental thread, rolling off down into the depth of times immemorial, two key words you are looking for in the past: war & civilians [12 letters only].
NSK Garda - Irwin
NSK Garda refers to the project in which the slovenian art group Irwin collaborates with various European armies. In these actions soldiers, with Malevich's cross on their sleeves, raise and guard the flag of the NSK State in Time. In that sense it is not really a performance but more some sort of tableau vivant of the real army wearing a Malevich cross. Art society and army society are social structures that are usually totally opposite to each other and very rarely mix. With this action Irwin is organizing this encounter.
Wall - Metahaven
The wall that separates 'us' from 'them', friend from enemy, organizes the opposition of imaginations. A conflict (or war) of projections, virtual placeholders, where the enemy is designed as an image that will never actualize. But the consequences of the wall are real; information which would allow us to find out whether our outrageous ideas about others hold any truth, is being managed and reduced to the level of images in emerging ‘zero friction zones’; public space, in every aspect, is being reshaped under the imagined threat from the opposite side of the wall.
Torture, terror, tranquility - Martha Rosler
Thanksgiving - Vesna Kesic
In early 1991, when Croatia received the first international recognitions of its statehood, the euphoria was enormous. Such were the paradoxes of the situation. While the third of the country was yet to feel the war casualties, the state television launched a trashy song "Danke Deutschland" as a mark of gratitude to the first state that gave the recognition. The author researches how the phrase Danke Deutschland changed its meaning through the time, what does it mean today in different sets of memory. The concept consists of a video clip and narration.
Terrorism - Volker Eick
The term ›terrorism‹ comes from the Latin word terrere, ›to frighten‹ via the French word terrorisme. The first use of the word ›terrorism‹ referred to state rule by terror. It was coined in the years after the French Revolution – the so-called Reign of Terror – and identified terror as an instrument of state power. Therefore, ›terrorism‹ became popular between 1793 and 1795 during the regime de la terreur.
Renaming machine - Suzana Milevska
Renaming Machine is a war concept that could be interpreted as a subtle but powerful strategy for erasing ethnic, cultural or gender identity without using any aggression or causing any direct material damage. It functions as a conceptual weapon of destruction, as a kind of wage war or a contest between the old and new identity layer. However, renaming simultaneously adds and multiplies a new layer of identity each time it erases one, because the names could be neither stolen nor completely erased: the best example of accumulation by dispossession in David Harvey’s terms.
Reconstruction - Andrea Kuluncic
Reconstruction will consist of screening of two videos: “A Reconstruction of an Unimportant Day in Our History” and “A Reconstruction of an Important Day in Our History”, by the artist. First video shows a day in a life of Josip Broz Tito during his stay in country side, in the castle. Castle is also known under the name of „Tito's Castle“. Tito as passionate hunter, often stayed in the Castle hunting wild animals, alone, with his wife Jovanka (who was as well passionate hunter) or with eminent foreign statesmen.