Marina GRŽINIĆ DISSIDENT HISTORIES. INSURGENT FUTURITIES

That is why we are talking about this in Gdańsk, a symbolic place for Europe, where in the years 1980–1988 dissident work was done, a revolution based on debate and non-stop negotiations which led to a new post-Cold War Europe, the tearing down of the Iron Curtain, and the destruction of the Berlin Wall. This is an example of changing history through dialogue, not violence.

The exhibition begins with a reference to Dada, and in particular to the Berlin Dada. Dadaism not only revolutionized art, but was also a social movement with a pan-European reach. Dada social art resulted from a critique of the culture that led to World War I. It was aimed at the anti-democratic and anti-freedom processes taking place in Germany, but also in Europe, in the period preceding World War II. Dadaism was a loud alarm signal that the world was heading towards a catastrophe. This catastrophe occurred, together with the horror of the Holocaust. Art, as we know it, has lost its meaning. The Holocaust had a European reach. Art is needed now that will initiate a critical way of thinking on a pan-European scale.

The exhibition prepared by Marina Gržinić and her assistant Jovita Pristovšek at the Gunter Grass Gallery in Gdańsk is another chapter in the presentation of ideas that constitute the content of Marina Gržinić’s films, always made in teams. Their point of reference is the context – political and social, cultural and anthropological – and not the individuality of the artist herself, which was the paradigm of Western art. Thus, resignation from exposing the ego is a manifesto for abandoning the artistic standards of the West in favor of art as a social practice, as Bürger defined the avant-garde. Or, in other words, in favor of context, as Jan Świdziński suggested in his theory of ‘art as contextual art,’ which takes on meaning in a given place and situation for the people present there, without claims to objectivity and universality.        

The current exhibition at the Günter Grass Gallery in Gdańsk entitled Dissident Histories. Insurgent Futurities consists of six films, in addition to those made in a duet with Aina Šmid, new productions with Tjaša Kancler and Jovita Pristovšek are also presented. The artists, as is natural in social art, organize a broad discourse around the exhibition with the participation of invited people, both to write texts and to participate in the conference, which is an integral part of the project. Klaus Theweleit, who studied the causes of Nazism in the individual psychology of perpetrators, assumes a special place here. His explanation has a circular structure, based on the Freudian scheme of psychoanalysis: the social (the model of upbringing) shapes the pathological personality of individuals who create the same society. This is an example of how the individual shapes the social and another warning to culture that stems from this exhibition, not to build a society of hatred in Europe today.