255.804 km2

To clarify the title of the show straight away: it is the area covered by former Yugoslavia – a dry fact, in order to avoid the tired geographic, political, economic, or nostalgic labels. Our aim was to try and present the best possible cross-section of the work produced by the younger generation of artists from the countries that used to constitute the above-mentioned federation.

First and foremost, it brought us up against the dilemma of how to “shortlist” the artists that we should meet, or rather, that others might think we should meet. We solved this by deciding to take the Young Visual Artist Award as our point of departure when we went about forming an insight into the individual art scenes. This is an umbrella-award contest organized jointly by the Foundation for a Civil Society and individual institutions from each of the countries. The said institutions also choose the specific names of the actual awards, usually after an artist or group deemed to have decisively impacted the coming generations of artists [1]. In this way we were able to avoid, at least to some extent, the subjectiveness of the local curators’ choices and arrived at a list of names of young artists who had entered the contest and been selected for the final presentation by boards of experts that change annually. Of course, the objectivity could still be questioned, but that can hardly be avoided, ever.

The constraints of the available time and space led us to limit our focus to the production of the finalists of the last three years, all in all almost eighty names, for the most part quite obscure. This was followed by meeting with the artists, in a way that some of them described as “old-fashioned” – talking to them, viewing their oeuvres, and jotting down notes. There were a number of artists we could not meet in person for a variety of reasons; we saw their work with the help of the Young Visual Artist Award organizers, since most institutions archive materials and keep up with the production of their finalists also after the show.

Yielding thirty artists in the end, the selection process was anything but easy: it took into consideration the entire oeuvre of the artist and centred on the execution and the representativeness of the artwork chosen in communication with him or her. The thought that guided us throughout the process was how the disparate works would combine into a whole both in terms of subject matter and technique, telling in this way the story of this region covering 255.804 square kilometres.

255 804 km2

First and foremost, it brought us up against the dilemma of how to “shortlist” the artists that we should meet, or rather, that others might think we should meet. We ...