After You is a visual-performative experiment in a gallery space
After You is everything held back before authority figures and unleashed unto friends
After You is an exhibition with dramatic pauses
After You are footnotes of great narratives and the finest dystopian quotes
After You is a theatrical play with live streams
After You is the mobilization of tenderness
After You is a history lecture from the background
After You is a movie set minus the sound of the clapperboard
After You is April u Beogradu and Proleće je, a ja živim u Srbiji
After You is a direct broadcast from the backstage
After You is about the thunder of the 1990s and the slush of the 2000s
After You is a hug in a crowd
After You is a medium of (un)controlled social performances
After You is the real vs. reality
After You is gender and generational polyphony
After You are short cuts of collective memory, personal trauma and joint great expectations
After You is as virtual as the reality
After You is directing emotions for feelings
After You is an atmosphere of continuous change speaking of times of major changes
After You are meaningful stories, common-places, true confessions and a pose for the public
After You is as fictional as the TV chyron with today’s most important news from the country and the world
After You are memories that fade and replicas that live
After You is about ideologies, traumas, responsibility, mistakes, taboos, freedom, auto-censorship, guilty pleasures, short-lived revolutions, consequences without sobriety
After You is an echo of the transgenerational stories that are too loud or have never been heard
After You is the question of whether a certain WE will ever see our turn come
After You is about the experiences and trials of Belgrade
After You is about crossed limits and social regressions, about the breakdown of values and nerves
After You concerns many and most of all those who feel invited or incited
AFTER YOU by Ivana Ivković presents a continuation of the artist’s multimedia research started several years ago with the works Lines, Rows, Columns (56th October Salon, Belgrade City Museum), Babylon the Great (Eugster II Gallery Belgrade), Amuse me (Contemporary Gallery Subotica), I Only Want To Love Me (Hošek Contemporary, Berlin), I DID IT FOR YOU (EICON gallery Museums Quartier, MQ 21, Vienna), IN HIM WE TRUST (Bitef Theater), which were conceptually and thematically developed around the different contexts and narratives of the spaces in which were displayed. Another important problematic framework concerns the issues of identity and gender experiences, the re-examination and deconstruction of gender role stereotypes, which Ivković emphasizes in her works by introducing the naked or half naked male body as a performative instrument or medium of specific sensitivity and sensuality. Realized in the form of site-specific interventions featuring some sort of tableau vivant situations and arrangements involving a larger number of participants/performers, for Ivković, the mentioned works have always dealt with the issues of the viewers’ experiences, i.e., their emotional and psychological perception of the ambiances and events. After first designing the stage/setting through a careful selection of visual and spatial elements that meaningfully and symbolically situate and contextualize the place of exhibition, the artist puts her work with the performers, characterized by minimal and improvised choreographic interventions, at the center of the installation’s significant communicative potential — the vitality of the scene, allowing the audience to connect with it more directly and provocatively.
In the practice that Ivković has been intensively developing over the last few years, drawing remains a significant constitutive element and event in the articulation of the idea. The author has been continuously dedicated to it from the very beginning, exploring the flexibility of its limits and the possibilities of its formal and interpretive transpositions to other media (photography, spatial and site-specific installations, textile and lighting objects, performances, and orchestrated scenes). Whether they are meant for a two-dimensional form or a particular spatial situation and context, all her works are primarily experienced in the emotional processuality, the gradual building of subtle and complex relationships between pictures, texts, and objects, between associative and symbolic meanings in the show. The contents deeply permeate the act of permanent introspection and the search for personal and artistic identity, intertwining intimate, personal stories with a specific perception of socio-political and cultural-historical circumstances and the sensibility of the atmosphere of various geographical regions (from North and Latin America to the Middle East), deriving from the author’s personal experience of frequent travels and many years of living a nomadic lifestyle, as another constructive segment of her artistic practice.
On the one hand, AFTER YOU is the sum of Ivković’s artistic achievements, but it is also a step
further in her research procedures, this time achieved by opening new chapters in the experimental approaches to exhibition formats, stage-performative practices, media, and genres. Teamwork, which remains crucial to the realization of the mentioned performances, is further expanded with collaborations and the inclusion of various other artists in the creative process, resulting in a full-format transdisciplinary expression and multifaceted ways of communicating the thematic content. Designed in a form bordering on a play, an exhibition, and expanded cinema, AFTER YOU at the very beginning introduces the viewer to an atmosphere of moods and suggested states rather than a space with representatively defined and seemingly observable contents, which is first read from the setup that raises associations to a conserved film set, an open theater stage, an abandoned TV studio, or even a psychedelic video. Situations in which the viewer is confronted with different sensations — 3D visualization of an ancient temple on the wall, lighting fixtures, accompanying stage props and furniture, cameras, and monitors that register every change and every movement in the gallery — create the impression of a time limbo of sorts, a non-place, a zone of thin boundaries between a sense of reality and complete displacement. The experience is additionally intensified by the presence of performers/narrators, their days- or hour-long physical being in the space or virtual presence via a purposefully built video installation and live online broadcasts, as they act out Jordan Cvetanović’s dramatic text based on the main starting point of the project — the thematization and problematization of the social context of everyday life in Serbia during the 1990s and 2000s. It is important to mention here that both in the realization and the conception of this exhibition-event, unlike in previous works, Ivković shifts her focus towards a moment of pure masculine appearance (as we have already seen, with all the potential forms of vulnerability and sensitivity) as the symbolical determinant of a society or a dominant factor in the shaping of heteronormative patterns and models of (co)existence and human relations. AFTER YOU puts gender fluidity on the stage and, hence, the uncertainty and playfulness of identity as well, or more precisely, introduces a polyphony of possible gender existences and manifestations, strongly underlined by the choice of participants, their costume design, and the drama in which HE, SHE, and IT play the leading roles. The inclusion of a transgenerational perspective (Child, Parent, Adult) as a form of a collective memory record about the destiny of a country and society significantly contributes to the layers of the dramatic text, but also to the idea some, it was a time of dramatically disturbed upbringing and maturation; to others, the era of a painful breakdown of values and transition into uncertainty. The end of the twentieth and the beginning of the new century and millennium, in the local socio-political and historical
circumstances, would bring a general and generationally undivided confrontation with the reality, which has often appeared as pure fiction or a repetitive, absurd and never-ending nightmare. Fragmentarily structured in dialogues consisting of quotations, excerpts, and references to various media, pop-cultural, political-economic-propaganda contents from the 1990s, but also reflections on the present moment that we are living or perceiving in the context of the new reality of social networks, Cvetanović’s dramatic text functions as a kind of cacophonous metanarrative and time echo. AFTER YOU is also the artist’s specific dedication to Belgrade, a story about its generational historical trials, its (anti) heroes, the expectation of their departure, about the unofficial anthems, applauses, and disappointments, about manipulation as a way of life and an instrument of power, about responsibilities, self-censorship, guilty pleasure, short-lived revolutions and consequences without sobriety. Designed as an ambiance-metaphor of social and personal experiences in a period of great changes, deep crises, ideological confusions, value shocks, and our persisting disorientation in the hypnotic loop of political failures and high hopes, AFTER YOU is a complex project that escapes definitions, just like the age that it is trying to review and understand. On this occasion, Ivković is making a new step forward when it comes to the participatory dimension of her work because the audience is faced with more than a simple task: they are invited and encouraged to contribute their own memories, (dis) agreements, resistance, discomfort, (non) acceptance, (non) belonging, individual and common confusions, and doubts. Where are we, and what are they? Is this real, and who is directing this?
Miroslav Karić, text from the catalogue of the exhibition