Banja Luka, Bosnia&Herzegovina
October 20 – November 15, 2009




1st chapter:
"Can you speak of this? -Yes, I can"


Curated by IVANA BAGO & ANTONIA MAJACA
@ Institute for Duration, Location and Variables (DeLVe)
www.delve.hr


Co-curators of the ‘1st chapter’ exhibition:
ANSELM FRANKE, VIT HAVRANEK & ZBYNEK BALADRAN, ANA JANEVSKI, ERDEN KOSOVA, NINA MONTMANN, JELENA VESIC

Participating artists and projects:
ZIAD ANTAR,YANE CALOVSKI, LIBIA CASTRO & OLAFUR OLAFSSON, IVAN GRUBANOV, NICOLINE VAN HARSKAMP (in collaboration with THIJS GADIOT), DRAGAN NIKOLIC, SLAVEN TOLJ, LIU WEI, JUDI WERTHEIN (Ivana Bago & Antonia Majaca, 'Can you speak of this? –Yes, I can.')
FLORIAN SCHNEIDER, EYAL WEIZMAN (Anselm Franke, 'Circles of Collaboration')
'The Archive of Self-Management' (Vit Havranek & Zbynek Baladran)
YAEL BARTANA, DANILO KIS, ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI, ZELIMIR ZILNIK (Ana Janevski, 'If You Want, We’ll Travel to the Moon Together')
'A.C.A.B.', RONEN EIDELMAN, AYDAN MURTEZAOGLU (Erden Kosova, 'Stepping Sideways')
YAEL BARTANA, ESRA ERSEN, SHARIF WAKED (Nina Montmann, 'We Hear You Speaking in Secret Dialects')
LUTZ BECKER, CHTO DELAT/WHAT IS TO BE DONE? (Jelena Vesic, 'The Future Is the Extension of the Past by Other Means')

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The title of the multi-faceted project *Where Everything is Yet to Happen* (WEIYTH) – starting off in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the framework of SpaPort Biennial 2009/10 – contains references to duration, location and variables of an expected event. These ‘uncertain parameters’ are located in a breach between a past that does not offer, in Badiou’s terms, an event to which we would bind ourselves to fidelity, and a future from which one expects precisely that - the *'miracle' of event*.

Although Bosnia-Herzegovina is the starting point of the project - with its perpetuating state of political 'temporariness' resulting from the still unresolved ethnic tensions and war traumas, the lack of consensus on the basic geopolitical 'constitution' and the unending protectorate of the 'international community’ – it is by no means the only ‘place of expectation’. On the contrary, the project seeks to subvert the view of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Balkans as the antithetical periphery of Europe, and refuses to exoticise it as a 'space of conflict'. Rather, it establishes it as an originating point of the gaze for reflecting on the urgency to rethink the notions of *future, community and co-existence* beyond the dominant models of *ethnopolitics* and of the *nation-state*, both in ‘transitional’ as well as Western, ‘advanced’ neo-liberal democracies .

The 1st chapter of the project, the exhibition *'Can you speak of this? -Yes, I can'*, takes its cue from Agamben's essay 'On Potentiality' and his referece to Anna Akhmatova's introduction to her poem Requiem, in which she recounts how, while waiting in line in front of the Leningrad jail during the Stalin purges, a woman suddenly asked her if she could 'describe this'. To this request to articulate the horror that surrounded them, the poet answered affirmatively. As Agamben notes, 'I can' here does not mean a conviction of the possession of certain capacities that guarantee success in ‘describing’ the indescribable, but a radical acceptance of the experience of *potentiality* – ' is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding'.

By appropriating the question and its explicitly affirmative answer, the first chapter of the project WEIYTH is a way of setting up a *stage for potentiality*, one where *'speech'*, but also a *refusal to speak* can take place - first of all by asking the basic question of what art can, and must, speak about in complex political environments such as BH, specifically the Republic of Srpska, without taking a form of yet another 'post/pre-emergency' biennial.

Answering this question emerges on the basis of curatorial 'complicity' - by the involvement of a group of co-curators the initial starting points of the project were further articulated, accentuated or questioned, and new ones instigated, evolving into a polyphonic structure that opens up space for several points of departure for the future of the project which is itself in constant mode of becoming.

'Can you speak of this? -Yes I can' is an elaboration of some of the themes and moments which have come into being gradually through the multidirectional communication among curators and artists, that reinforced its 'diagnostic' and 'analytic' capacity, forming the exhibition as an initial project thesaurus comprised of a series of topics and questions related to the issues of *complicity, collaboration, politics of language, belonging, culturalization of politics, the potential of non-essentialist forms of community and finally, the audacity of speech as a form of the political*.


The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with contributions by the artists, curators and co-curators. (the publication is available for download at: www.delve.hr)


*Exhibition opening*:
Banja Luka Fortress, October 20, 2009, 8 pm

Roundtable discussion with Ivana Bago & Antonia Majaca, Vit Havranek, Ana Janevski, Anselm Franke and Jelena Vesic, October 20, 2009, 4 pm

Locations:
Terzic Gallery | Salon of the Museum of Contemporary art | Banja Luka Fortress | Public space


WEIYTH is a project of the Institute for Duration, Location and Variables (DeLVe), conceived and developed by Ivana Bago & Antonia Majaca


Organized by:
*Protok – Center for Visual Communication*
Veselina Masleše 1/11, Banja Luka, BH
www.protok.org

Supported by:
Swiss Cultural Program in the Western Balkans, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Ministry of Education and Culture of RS, City of Banja Luka, Ministry of civil affairs BH

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Institute for Duration, Location and Variables (DeLVe)
www.delve.hr