Salon

Opening of the exhibition: Saturday, December 12th 2009 at 7 P.M.
 

After the exhibition at the Serbian Pavilion in the 53 Venice Biennale, Zoran Todorovic’s project Warmth will be presented to the Belgrade audience. In the Biennale (from June 7th to November 22nd 2009), Todorovic’s project was presented together with Katarina Zdjelar’s project titled But if You Take My Voice, What Will Be Left to Me? and both artists aroused great attention of the international public and foreign press wrote about them in a rather affirmative manner. Todorovic’s and Zdjelar’s projects were contrasted in a complex context of “national representation“: one of them energetically and methodically develops its own space of fatalism and openly identifies with it, while the other, aiming simultaneously at our empathy and critical mistrust, forms its own space of engagement.
As an artist whose work came under the public eye during the nineties, Zoran Todorovic (Belgrade, 1965) articulates his scepticism towards the comforting ideas of social progress, emancipation and seemingly benevolent social regulations. His projects are observations and performances of biopolitical control that explore ways in which body and its “products“ can be used as “raw materials“ for disturbing counteractions. In a number of his previous projects, Todorovic challenged the borders of representation and participation, as well as ethical norms and aesthetic standards. Some of these projects are: Assimilation (1998, ongoing), the event of public consuming of food made out of remains of a human body after a plastic surgery; Agalma (2004, ongoing), the event of public washing with soap made out of fat removed from the artist’s body during a surgery; and Laughter (2001), for which he used nitrous oxide, a gas that acts upon the nervous system (causing laugher, but in too high a dosage also an outbreak of hysteria), which he released during a group exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade.
Project Warmth includes systematic stockpiling of human hair (up to 3 tons), which was collected for moths in hairdressing salons, where it is cut off voluntarily, according to personal desires, as well as in military barracks, where haircutting is a norm in an environment of discipline, control or “social care”. The conditions under which this process was taking place in a closed system were thoroughly documented, and this biowaste was then “recycled” as material for strange looking blankets that were piled and delivered for exhibition, use and examination. The final result, the “undesired product” of this process, can be understood as a DNA map of the “Serbian nation”, in which every participating body has been inscribed and could be potentially identified. The piled blankets are at the border between functionalism and symbolism. However, they fatally undermine both these modes of representation and production of meaning.
Exhibition of this project in the Salon of the MCA is comprised out of 9 large bales of piled blankets on pallets and monitors on which plays the video documentation that follows the entire production process: from cutting and collecting hair, to storing and cleaning, to transport and machine manufacturing of felt in Tatko factory in Prokuplje.
The Museum of Contemporary Art published a book on the project Warmth, edited by Stevan Vuckovic and with the texts from Aleksandar Zistakis, Melentije Pandilovski, Jasmina Cubrilo, Branislav Dimitrijevic and Stevan Vukovic.