Fotograf Magazine

The Principle of Pseudo-documentarism in the Central European and Balkan Post-totalitarian Visual Arts

The present text is in fact an unsystematic diary, as it reflects experiences I gathered during my collaboration with contemporary Central European and Balkan visual artists and exhibiting institutions. In the course of my travels, undertaken while working on a number of curatorial projects, I repeatedly encountered feelings of ambiguous nostalgia, combined with a critique of the recent totalitarian past, as well as a cautious expectation of further developments. I gradually came to realize the specificity of my own lot in the midst of social and political change, as well as the efforts of a whole number of artists of my generation to reflect this hybrid environment, and to some degree also to mediate it. With them I often felt as though I was rambling in the streets of the film Casablanca, in a world on the edge of events in which the reflections of a given period formed a unique hybrid with an ingenuously composed structure of its own visual (and to some extent also mimetic) pseudo-documentation.