Project author: Dorijan Kolundžija
Project curators: Dorijan Kolundžija, Milica Pekić, Ana Adamović
Artists: Dalija Aćin, Bojan Đorđev, Siniša Ilić, Dragan Mileusnić, Željko Serdarević, Manja Ristić, Ana Sofrenović, Igor Štanglicki
Dokumentation, photography: Vladimir Miladinović
Organiser:  S.Cen – Center for scene design, architecture and technology / OISTAT center Serbia, President: Radivoje Dinulović
Production: Kiosk platform for contemporary art, Belgrade, Serbia, Gallery 12, Belgrade, Serbia
Organization: Iva Milekić, Jelena Piljić, Svetlana Stojanović
Design of the publication: Andrej Dolinka

Project Displacements was realized as program of National Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia on the Prague Quadrennial 2011. After Prague, the project was exhibited in the Art Gallery of Belgrade Cultural Centre. Displacements is a collaborative project that aims to explore the principal aspects of contemporary art production and live performance within a newly built platform, which is in essence, an interactive and interdisciplinary physical interface for live holographic performance video streaming.

The limitations and possibilities that these new conceptual, production, performance and spectatorship conditions bring will inevitably generate specific experiences both for the audience and performers involved; the platform’s fundamental goal is to initiate, monitor, document and classify these experiences.

The Displacements platform is constructed as a physical space in a manner that mimics a small performance stage, embodying the means of online communication within a digital, virtual space. It enables artists living in different geographies to jointly create the piece. Newly created productions can be performed live from distant places and experienced by a physically present audience. Video, audio, performance streaming, web presence and holographic projection are the mediums used as materials from which the artwork emerges. The selected artists come from different fields covering visual arts, performance, theatre, music, literature, film and new media.

Through new art productions, the Displacements platform explores complex notions of personal experience, sensibilities, presence, displacement, audience, immediacy, space, private vs. public, intimate vs. spectacular, individual vs. collective, digital vs. corporeal.

What happens in the absence of the mutual physical presence of performers and audience?
What happens when the virtual body inhabits the same space as its audience, disrupting the overall scheme of physical limitations of the digital?
How do performers negotiate isolation from, or absence of the audience? How does it reflect in performance?
How do the physical limitations of the proposed platform’s space reconstruct performance?

Artistic responses provoked by these questions and elaborated within the production processes were collected by documenting diverse modes of involvement, generating an extensive database of discussions, communication transcripts and audio and video records. This material, presented as a browsable archive of all discussed ideas, concepts and processes, could be relevant not only to the creation and development of the platform, but also to the prospect of expanding relevant performance-related art forms beyond the binding box of the presently identified and approved of, and into the realm of digital.

The platform, exhibited at the Serbian national pavilion of PQ 2011, aims to explore art forms which seek to divest from the premise of mutual material existence and explore the legitimacy of digital, or even more so, multiple presences. It maps out routes for the potential departure from mutual presence of artist and audience and examines both theoretically and practically the ensuing implication on the performing arts.

Exhibition Displacements,
Prague 2011

Exhibition Displacements,
Cultural center of Belgrade, 2011