Artist category: Special projects artists

Bogdanka Poznanović was an artist who showed great innovation through her artistic practice and social activity. In addition to creative work, she also dealt with the affirmation of intermedia art. She introduced new media into her work, collaborating with some of the most influential artists, curators and critics of the global art scene.

She was one of the first artists who engaged in actions in public space, mail-art, artists’ books, installations and video art.

Bogdanka Poznanović studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Her artistic practice was initially close to Art informel, but she quickly turned to New Art Practice, interdisciplinary works and new media.

The life and work of Bogdanka Poznanović were significantly marked by pedagogical practice. She founded the Visual Studio for Intermedia Research, in which video art has been primarily researched and created since 1980. Bogdanka Poznanović was the first professor of new media and video art at an art academy or faculty in the former Yugoslavia.

The Feedback letter-box, information-decision-action project was realised by Bogdanka Poznanović through 1973 and 1974. In it, she invited 35 artists worldwide to send her a record of their mailboxes. She exhibited the collected answers as a work of art. Poznanović writes about this project, which has the characteristics of mail art, in the Delo magazine: “The practice of mail art often overcomes the depressive isolation of creators, conditioned by the manipulative-commercial relations of artists and social structure. In this interaction process, messages are continually circulating, which are realised by various unpretentious techniques, so creative activity is expressed in one of the most democratic forms. […] Postal regulations, format, weight, stamps, addresses, dates, and mail carriers are involved in the communication process and structure of the mail item, and they also have a significant function. […] Dynamics, processuality and flexibility are essential features of this type of activity that exists in the planetary space and contributes to modifying modern socio-cultural structures.

The Heart-object action was carried out by Bogdanka Poznanović on September 20, 1970, in Novi Sad. It lasted until September 29 and was set in the Salon of the Youth Tribune. In styrofoam, she made a heart 2 × 2 meters high and 20 cm thick, which she wrapped in red cloth and installed a metronome that beat 80 beats per minute. Four people carried the Heart object from the old Novi Sad bridge to the Youth Tribune at the Catholic Gate with the desire to create a procession behind it. By introducing a ludistic element into the urban situation, she invites viewers to participate in that action. She explores the relationship of the art object in the outdoor and gallery space. After crossing the city, the Heart-object was placed in the Salon of the Youth Tribune.

Franco di Vito was a member of the Operativo R group. During that period, he created abstract works with the motif of stripes expressing innovative research on the line-colour-measurement relationship based on frequency modulation.

Stipo Pranyko was a notable representative of Arte Povera. The self-taught artists lived in various places, from Germany, Italy and France, settling between 1990 and 2012 in the Canary Islands and finally moving to Munich, Germany.

In his works, he renounced colour, opting for only white. The gauze and paint used in his works are woven across wooden elements or placed in various installations. He adds diverse, simple, “poor” materials to his creations– nails, wire, gauze, rice, a spoon, a sieve, antique tools, objets trouvés etc. The works of this nomadic artist reflect and make his everyday life. They serve as fragments of diary entries of his personal path. The juxtapositions of collage fragments, contrasts, textures, light and shadow, hard and soft edges, and the building of layer witness the artist’s constant movement in life.

Antun Motika was a versatile artist who tried his hand in many media during a long artistic career, attaining recognition in different fields of artistic creation.

Motika is one of the most important experimenting artists and visionaries in the field of development and application of technology, architecture, stage design, advertisement and industrial design, and painting. In the seclusion of his studio, since 1941, he has performed many pioneering experiments on glass and foil, with organic and inorganic matter, experiments on photographs, on photo-film and x-ray film, metal and plexiglass. He intervened through different painterly and non-painterly procedures: he would burn, perforate or engrave pieces of glass and plastics, pour tar or other viscous substances, join them together, and create ‘basins’ into which he would then add paint and various liquids.

Like a scholar, he would “read” and record the obtained results of his experiments in notebooks and notepads. Numerous sketches for projections with light effects witness this practice. Experiences from his study visits to Paris would inspire him to research Dadaist and surrealist expressions and techniques, reaching from collages to photomontage, photograms, smoke images, i.e. sooted paper, decalcomania, frottage and “automated” drawings – a certain kind of “copies of sub-consciousness” that he created with Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music in the background.

Zoran Todorović, in his works, deals with the topics of contemporary information culture, surveillance, biopolitical management and control by uncovering inconvenient truths and hidden motivations. He takes on the established limits of participation and ethical and aesthetical standards.

Todorović’s works can be classified into three groups. Those in the first one use physical and chemical laws through which he creates a possible physical discomfort, such as in the work Laughter (2001), when he filled the air with nitric oxide (laughing gas). In the second group are the works which use models of management, discipline and surveillance as the mechanisms for the functioning of power, as in Hush (1998 – 1999) or Gypsies and Dogs (2007). Works from the third group are about the body and its waste material. In the work Agalma (2004) the participants washed themselves with soap made of the fat removed from the artist’s body during surgery.

Todorović is one of the founders of the New Media Department in the Faculty of Arts at the Art University in Belgrade, where he teaches Transmedia Research.