Liste Art Fair 2021

Eugster || Belgrade at Liste Art Fair
with works by Emir Šehanović and Saša Tkačenko

20 – 26 September 2021
Messe Basel Hall 1.1

Visit us at Booth 71

Our parents’ generation reacts to global warming with naive ignorance or denial, as if it’s another one of those “Internet jokes” or conspiracies, or just none of their business. The sad truth is that, this was the generation oblivious to the circulation and accumulation of waste and was fascinated with cars and was only beginning to acknowledge the harmful impact of cigarettes, or that not only crazy people go to therapy. Unfortunately it kind of was their business indeed – but it seems that they didn’t know it.

This is the world that we inherited, with a suspenseful sense of incompetence and a helpless stare into the abyss created by greenhouse gas emissions. Against all the last-minute recycling and sustainable living plans that we’re learning to adapt to, or at least trying to, there is a strong, indifferent force of nature that does what it does, regardless of whether we believe it. Sometimes the situation feels as if foreshadowed by Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and that ending scene where things just happen, whether Claire and Justine like it or not.

At LISTE 2021, down here at the Messe Basel Hall 1.1 booth 71, there are two types of reflection on this.

One of them looks at the future that’s already here, with a practical attitude. It belongs to Emir Šehanović – an artist who approaches new events with curiosity, with a desire to shape whatever comes along and to find a way to work with change. This has been present from the very beginning of his practice, when the future was portrayed through oracle-like figurines, uncanny quasi-spiritual shapes and creatures, mystical narratives that derive from the magical side of the otherworldly. In the more recent years of his career, he turned to technology and what we make of it. Science is seen both as our friend and inspiration, but also as a weapon of capitalism and of the wealthy. Šehanović is trying to bring the two together through a neutral point of view, a crafty hand indifferent to good and bad, beautiful and scary. The new sculptures he makes, aptly, look like they were made by an alien creature (be it a creature of an artificial or an extraterrestrial intelligence), personifying the other other, the something, a stranger thing that doesn’t come from us, but we feel its eerie presence.

If Šehanović is the Justine of our own story, Claire’s point of view is that of Saša Tkačenko, almost too painfully human – but with a twist. Being human is presented through the non-ordinary old humans, idolised characters of 20th century music and culture, who were created, by the industry, to be super human (Whitney Houston, George Michael, the girls from Virgin Suicides). He portrays them through items and words, but he handpicks the moments when we see them slip through the cracks of their own weaknesses, or through the fingers of the faulty hands that made them. Funnily, the haunting futuristic views from the 80s and the 90s, the ones that actually let us down, are here used as an analogy for the ghostly promises of our own time. As said in the beginning of this text, we often feel like this (climate change, pandemics, constant threat of the world ending) was somehow brought upon us. Are we really that blameless, or helpless though? Tkačenko’s human is trying to process change through excessive emotion, to go into this future almost unwillingly and still carry the past into it, as a safe space, or as something to blame. But his human also begins to realise that by dragging this nostalgia along, they become old and young at the same time, trying to condense all time, present, past and future, into a single emotion, the only one that can take all this in. Anxiety – the ultimate feeling of our time.

Yet, anxiety is so vague that it feels like everything else. Vanity. Confusion. Fear. Guilt. Lack of confidence. Lack of gratitude. On the other hand, it could be flipped into excitement. It could be a trigger for action. A feeling that twists your gut but also makes your gut tell you, that you have to do something, to break on through, to the other side.

We carry anxiety around like a ring on our finger, we’re obliged, faithful to it. We are embellished by it, marked by it. We’re married to it, the question is whether we make this relationship toxic or productive.

Personally, I’d like to be able to dance again in 20 years or so, on this planet, with feet slightly less guilty than those before me.

Natalija Paunić