MICRO NARRATIVES

48th October Salon, Belgrade

This year’s International Exhibition October Salon presents an artistic message which announces a new attitude and a new orientation of artists in the era of the radicalization of global conflicts, religions, ideologies and socio-cultural value structures. The surprising and emotionally touching rapprochement to the small realities, to direct socio-cultural constellations and micro communicative relations requires an anti-hierarchical, anti-monumentality, sophisticated and intimate, emphatic and modest artistic practice concentrated on the artistic creation of new situations and on the processes of sensibilization. Here we have a sophisticated, transitory poetic micro narration which expresses the personal involvement in the direct artistic reality and sensible empathy and, at the same time determines again the localization of the artistic practice in the dense versatility of total social processes.

The micro narratives represent an attempt to redefine the artistic practice in the bushes of complex sociocultural situations, which reflect, by their fragmentary, spontaneous, anti-teleological, tolerant, open and sensitive acceptance, the typical post utopian state of our contemporary era and offer a new, credible and modest way of reading.

The smoothness, the flexibility and the empathy are the moments of a new strategy of poetic modesty which observes and evaluates the direct small realities. This seems very important for the contemporary artistic practice, and these are the artists who put in the center of their work those nuances and intimacies, the direct realities and sensitive details, thus contributing to the intensication of empathy.

It seems that this empathy and poetic openness towards those sophisticated anthropological constellations represent a self-understood, intimate approach to small realities, the interest in the contextuality of direct micro communities the empathic observation of the importance and peculiarity of situations, the diving into the mentioned versatile, concrete, individual and non-generalized micro cultural bushes, which bears the features of separate entities and constellations, and the specific features, in principle, of the new micro narration. In these micro narrations, dreams and psychic projections are interconnected, and the personally experienced and culturally learned situations as well, the direct small realities and the socio-cultural simulacrum.

This recontextualization of the artistic practice in laminated, contradictory cultural-historical processes and also the sensual, picturesque incarnation of references by metaphoric and allegoric systems of symbols, put the work of a contemporary artist into modest, intimate and direct small realities, in which cultural metaphors play just as limited, relative signs of certain demonumentalized forms of pathos and allegories. It seems that this attitude of new intimacy, sensitivity and skepticism towards monolithic, utopian, generally accepted ideologies, and the openness and tolerance towards small realities of non-diminishable complex constellations is very important, even courageous in Serbia, and in Central and Eastern Europe as well.

The exhibition Micro-Narratives is divided into three parts. The first, biggest part, entitled Temptation of small realities – Micro Communities, presents international artists of the middle and new generations who face the problems of the creation of new anthropological constellations and of micro communicative situations. There is a striking number of women in this sector, which maybe shows that the new art of our era expresses a special affinity towards micro communicative sensibility, empathy and emotional involvement, i. e. the aptitude to soft, intimate, sophisticated behavior with small realities, and as such maybe shows a certain antimonumentalistic, feminine entity.

The second part is entitled Urban Crossroads – New York, Paris, Seoul. In this sector we present artists from three metropolises from three different continents, which are often valuated as the references of artistic strategies of young generations. The three big cities represent three different cultural traditions and three different systems of social organization accepted by many artists in the contemporary global culture and transmitted by them in other cultural centers.

The third part of the exhibition, entitled Re-Taking Grounds – Working in Immediate Relations present the works in open space of urban situations, with intensive communication among various areas of contemporary urban life in the center.

Lóránd Hegyi