B. Dimitrijević I met - Sarajevo edition

Centre de la photographie Genève

ARS AEVI Museum of Contemporary arts Sarajevo

Braco Dimitrijević I met at 11.21 am, Sarajevo 2002

Gallery Manifesto Sarajevo

12.-22.01.2024

As part of the platform, that the Centre de la Photographie (CPG) in Geneva implemented on the importance of an institution dedicated to photography in the field of contemporary art and in the near-by vicinity of the Museum and Center of Contemporary art, Đerković’s work entitled “Braco Dimitrijević I met at 11.21 am, Sarajevo 2002” was placed in April 2021 on the common building of these three institutions.

This site-specific work refers to the famous series "Casual Passer-by" of Ðerković's friend and a fellow citizen Braco Dimitrijević, one of the pioneers of conceptual contemporary art. With the essence of human behavior and the reading of the everyday environment, in Đerković's work, we come to question the mechanisms of promoting certain ideas/persons, which are culturally installed in the rather closed and Calvinist Geneva contemporary society. The process of this public intervention is in fact in the opposite direction from the original work by Braco Dimitrijević, whose idea was to analyze certain behaviors of the public, who automatically “read” the portrayed subjects as well-known figures from politics and media, which they were not originally.

In this work of relational aesthetics, the Geneva public was given the exact opposite to read, because the portrait subject in this case is none other than Braco Dimitrijević himself. Ðerković’s portrait of one of the most famous contemporary artists, installed under the curatorship of the distinguished art critic and then Geneva Center of Photography director Joerg Bader, on the facade of the building "Le Commun", a complex with the Museum and Centre for Contemporary art (Musée d'art contemporain MAMCO / Centre d'art contemporain CAC), it intertwines the monumental with the everyday, through the idea of media dogma and prejudice towards a work of art in a direct and powerful manner. At the same time, it’s questioning (actio et reactio) the state of cultural conscience of the local cultural milieu about the nucleus of the works of the Geneva Museum of Contemporary Art (MAMCO) in whose collection among the authors are Braco Dimitrijević and Andrej Ðerković. With this example of transforming art into behavior, we come to the point that the same becomes the equivalent of art, that is, self-reflection of object-oriented art.

With the Sarajevo setting of this work, as in the Geneva case, the same has the task of demystifying the state of cultural conscience of the Sarajevo cultural milieu about the nucleus of the works of the local ARS AEVI Museum of Contemporary Art, whose collection also includes these two Sarajevo artists among the authors. ARS AEVI Museum should get this year, its own building after three decades.

Braco Dimitrijević and Andrej Ðerković, Gallery Manifesto, Sarajevo, 2024