This year’s Queer Salon, which will be realized within the Pride Week, as an accompanying program which is traditionally held in the Big gallery of the Cultural Center ‘’Grad’’, will be opened on Monday, September 14.
The exhibition will primarily deal with the detection of stereotypes regarding particular minority social groups, patriarchal society and others. The very concept of the exhibition whose title ‘’Queer Salon’’ is inherently dichotomous and somehow is the combination of incompatible.
While the term queer, a relatively new term, refers to all people, qualities and actions that deviate from the heteronormative social form, insomuch salon, a term that belongs to the past, is a representative of heteronormative, conservative society of the nineteenth century, manipulating with various ideals of the fine arts that had slowly been overcame in the centuries that followed (with an emphasis on slowly). Therefore, the combination of the two terms may be found wrong, improper, but to the authors of the exhibition, on the contrary, was very interesting and inspiring. The group of art historians, Impost, exploring contemporary domestic art scene came up with the idea that conceives the exhibition as a selection of the works of individual artists whose work fits into a certain preset context, providing answers and interpretation of the exhibition theme. A unique entity will assemble by this method within which a new meaning in the whole is being loaded up by some of the works, and which the audience may find unclear outside of it. Likewise, the selection method is a conventional method of Parisian Salons, the abovementioned, although the authors do not apply the same selection criteria as well as two centuries ago. The “ideals” which the authors had in this case are related to the representation of stereotypes of every kind. Presented stereotypes thus become quasi-ideals, which are present in nowadays society, but which are not ideals in the true sense, but rather a kind of relic of a society strongly patriarchal and captured in the collective conformism, unwilling to accept otherness, and be tolerant. In this sense, the gallery space or salon becomes a kind of a clinical environment, where stereotypes are isolated and presented, and the audience should perform over them their testing and make a diagnosis. Diagnosing quasi-ideals, the society is diagnosed too, but also every individual is made to think about it.
Artists who will present their work on Queer Salon are:
Boris Šribar
Miodrag Stanišić
Vuk Vučković
Mane Radmanović
Marina Marković
Tadija Janičić
Shkart
Nataša Milutinović
Jugodrom
Dejan Klement
Dušan Marino
Aleksandra Kovačević i Jelena Nikolić
The gallery space in which artists will exhibit their works has been designed in a way that leads to the audio installation, a tunnel verbal terror, a terror that some people from minority groups survive on a daily basis, and which verbalize certain stereotypes. Audio installation is of interactive type and structure for its performance will be collected by surveying audience.
All these elements should raise the visitors’ awareness of the pervasive violence and intolerance towards diversity, which today is an unavoidable topic.
The exhibition will be open until Sunday, September 20.
Curatorial team Impost is made of art historians:
Selena Andrić
Jelena Marković
Iva Parađanin
Aleksandra Stolić
Aleksandar Stojanović
Nevenka Šmakić
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