CRITICS HAVE CHOOSEN 2023: From / To ENJOYMENT
Art Gallery – Cultural Centre of Belgrade, Knez Mihailova 6
Opening: January 26, 2022 at 19:00
26. 1 – 5. 3. 2023.
CRITICS HAVE CHOOSEN 2023: From / To ENJOYMENT
Curated by Maja Stanković
Artists: VCS (Vocal-Curatorial Syndrome), Dragana Žarevac, Neša Paripović, Milija Pavićević, Emilija Terzić, Predrag Terzić, Jovan Čekić, Zorica Čolić
Bilingual catalogue can be downloaded from here: CATALOGUE
The author of the 2023 edition of the traditional annual exhibition Critics Have Chosen – critics’ reception of contemporary visual art, continuously presented at the Art Gallery since 1967, is art historian Maja Stanković the winner of the Lazar Trifunović Award for 2018.
…What is enjoyment today? What is its connection with capitalist formations of power, production and exchange of goods? Where is enjoyment in the world of algorithmically created needs, generated desires and clichéd ways to satisfy them? Is enjoyment a chemical reaction, communication in the brain between two or more transmitters with or without additional stimuli? Is enjoyment a relic of the past, a recurrence of enlightenment and humanistic values and beliefs that are superfluous today, in a post-human and post-produced reality? Is it banal, stupid and redundant to talk about enjoyment in a world where profit is the only unquestioned value? Is enjoyment separate from thinking or is it a condition to start thinking? Or is enjoyment the driving force for breaking free from the given framing and the creative potential – the only thing that can stand up to retrograde narratives, destructive forces, and neoliberal madness? “Is there any ‘enjoyment’ other than powerful, dominant, erectile enjoyment?” (Malabou) Or is enjoyment – the enjoyment of domination? Is it possible to talk about enjoyment outside of dominance? Or is enjoyment itself power?. (from the catalogue text)
Curatorial text by Maja Stanković read here.
Artist’s biographies take from here.
Maja Stanković is a professor at Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, at the Department of Digital Arts. Special field of interest: contemporary art, theory and digital humanities. She published the book Liquid Context. Contextual Practices in Contemporary Art (2015) and Networked Image (2022).
* Image by Milija Pavićević
A frame from the video by Dragana Žarevac
Part of the work by Jovan Čekić