Taking in climate change at Helsinki Biennial, diversity at the Ateneum, and visiting contrasting new galleries in an art school and bar toilets (!), Mike Pinnington’s return to Finland’s capital city is a timely reminder of how the arts are valued by the world’s happiest people… 

We’re at a table in the cosy waterfront setting of Wellamo, a tiny restaurant whose raison d’etre is its commitment to using only Finnish/Nordic ingredients. We are, therefore, taking the opportunity to enjoy some home-grown beers and wines. The place is packed with cheerful locals and whispering couples; it feels like the perfect spot to celebrate an occasion, or have a date.

This isn’t our first time in Helsinki: we’ve been lucky enough to visit several times, working with artists and institutions on text in all its forms – from gallery interpretation to artist statements. Owing to the global pandemic, though, it’s been a while. Soaking in the warm atmosphere and smells emanating from Wellamo’s kitchen, it feels good to be back.

We’re here to meet with Arja Miller, director of Helsinki Art Museum (known to all simply as HAM). We chat about the parallels and differences between art scenes in the UK and Finland, and, more specifically, between Liverpool and Helsinki; during our visit, each is host to a Biennial. And, coincidentally, Helsinki’s festival had been curated by Joasia Krysa, Professor of Exhibition Research and Head of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design.

We discuss some of the artists who have made the trip from exhibiting in Liverpool over to Helsinki, such as augmented world-builders Keiken Collective (Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos and Tanya Cruz), and Danielle Braithwaite Shirley, who foregrounds Black Trans lives using video game installations – all who’ve shown at FACT Liverpool. Talk turns to commissioning, and Finland’s Percent for Art principle, whereby one percent of any construction project’s budget is designated to acquiring or funding works of art. UK readers won’t be terribly surprised to hear that Britain has never had such a policy, meaning that it’s up to other parties to stump up the money. It casts new light on cities like Liverpool’s appetite and commitment – never mind financial clout – for public art.

As outsiders, it can’t help but reinforce our sense that this part of the world thinks differently about itself – and its citizens – as Finland once again tops the UN’s World Happiness Report (which takes into account health, income and social support). We enjoy the rest of the evening chatting casually about art; we’re in good company after all.

Later in the week, we are reminded again of this sense of responsibility to citizens when meeting with the City of Helsinki‘s Acting Cultural Director, Mari Männistö. One of the initiatives she is most proud of being involved with is Culture Kids, a scheme whereby each child is invited, free of charge, to two events per year, by an assigned organisation who acts as a cultural guardian for that child.

Coming from a country in which most galleries and museums feel as though they pick up the slack for, rather than work in tandem with, local and national government when it comes to arts education and engagement, we can’t help but be impressed, but also dismayed. We reflect on how obvious and beneficial Culture Kids is – and wonder why similar government-led provision isn’t happening back in the UK.

Given such benefits, it comes as little surprise to find a smattering of English speakers in this city – and not just the bilingual locals. At the cavernous Kuva/Tila gallery, Academy of Fine Arts Mylly, University of the Arts Helsinki’s new exhibition space for students and staff, we find Irish artist and lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice, Suzanne Mooney, a resident since 2018. Over coffee, we chat about Mooney’s undergraduates, their expectations, and the question of staying in the city post-graduation to contribute to the scene here, or moving abroad for different experiences. Artist and academic both, Mooney has seen both sides. Certainly, the provision and opportunity for those studying here at the academy is ample; light-filled artist studios, cutting-edge teaching resources, and a dedicated modern gallery, all contained under the roof of this purpose-built space.

That evening we meet with a colleague of Mooney’s, and our friend from Manchester: Professor of Fine Art Pedagogy at UniArts, Magnus Quaife (who, despite the name, is not Swedish). As a modest bar crawl ensues, we take in some of Magnus’ – and our – favourite places to grab a beer in Helsinki, including trendy dive bar SalamaNation, home of Quaife’s new in-house gallery space, Suihkulähde. Translated as Fountain in Finnish, and perfectly reflecting Quaife’s sense of humour, it is, of course, in the accessible toilet. Showing only one artwork at any given time, it is at once a nod to art history via Marcel Duchamp, and an exploration of where we – and the public at large – might give a few minutes of our full attention to a print or photograph… or even the soap (by Jack Brown).

Amid the flurry of meetings, and the odd beverage, we make sure to carve out time to grasp more of the city’s rich arts and culture offer. Next morning, not too worse for wear, we head in the direction of a gallery that should be on every visitor’s radar: home of the national collection, the Ateneum. A Neo-Renaissance beauty that is a stone’s throw from the similarly striking train station, it holds great riches spanning Finland’s famed art history.

The major draw of its displays has recently been subject to a rehang, and outgoing director Marja Sakari (who will be replaced this year by Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff). “We took change as our starting point,” Sakari is quoted on the wall; “Our key concerns were the stories the collection can tell us today, and how it could truly be a collection for the whole nation.”

The sections – Art and Power, The Age of Nature, Images of a People and Modern Life – bring focus to the story, one that takes in and reflects not only the past, but also the beginnings of Finnish art, and artists’ reckoning with a tumultuous present and unpredictable future. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, known for his illustrations of Finnish national epic the Kalevala, and luminaries such as Helene Schjerfbeck and Hugo Simberg remain towering figures. Whatever your taste, there is something for you. There is always work to be done, however, especially in better reflecting a diversifying society that is barely 100 years old – and the spectre represented by a new coalition government that counts among its number the anti-immigration Finns Party (formerly known as True Finns).

Art isn’t created in a vacuum; while the romantic stereotype of it being an endeavour of solitude persists – better that the muse can strike – ideas and inspiration also spring forth in company. In the name of this and more, that evening we head to the offices of Laura Köönikkä, an independent curator, mentor and driving force behind the Finnish Art Agency. The occasion is one of simply coming together with those who might not ordinarily do so; the artists squeezed, sardine like, into a room of their peers.

Conversations, common concerns – and, no doubt, gossip – are soon animatedly shared. My multiple visits to Finland have afforded me the chance to meet many contemporary artists. This is something I deeply appreciate: to speak about how they present their work, hear about their wider practice, their influences and experiences, their hopes and expectations. And the evening presents a great opportunity to reconnect with some familiar faces. It’s genuinely lovely to see Camilla Vuorenmaa and Anu Kauhaniemi, two very different painters, whose careers I’ve followed since our first meetings on previous trips.

Not a natural conversationalist, however, I eventually take the chance to sit down. But I soon find myself chatting away with Kreetta Järvenpää, and I’m so glad I did, for she’s a photographer capable of incredible things. Her studio photographs, which must be seen to be believed, look like old master paintings of flowers. Later, I talk with Sami Havia, who brings the worlds of abstraction and figuration together in his questioning works on paper, and meet the recently crowned Young Artist Of The Year, sculptor Eetu Huhtela. All of which goes to demonstrate the richly textured make-up of Helsinki’s contemporary scene; it’s one we’re always so happy to be reacquainted with.

Next day, we head to the harbour to catch the ferry over to Vallisaari – one of Helsinki’s 330 islands which between 1918 and 2012 was under the purview of the Finnish Defence Forces. Islands have long been used by authors as a literary device; set apart from the fixed reality of the mainland by choppy waters, they readily lend themselves to flights of fancy.

Helsinki Biennial has leaned into this, staging the festival of contemporary art on Vallisaari for a second time, with the title New Directions May Emerge. This iteration takes its theme from anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s assertion that “As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge.” It’s a thoughtful departure point, one with the intention of exploring how, even at this relatively late stage of proceedings, “we might find new [and hopefully better] ways of living in, and understanding, the world.”

Traversing Vallisaari’s woodland paths and coastline – which on our sun-kissed visit can’t help but be the star of the show – we encounter some well-selected works that enrich this idea of mutual worlds. A favourite work is by Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė (who has just been awarded the Ars Fennica prize). Her ‘eco sci-fi thriller’ Hypoxia, a multi-channel installation, weaves together traditional storytelling and the widely reported ‘discovery’ of an alien craft in the ocean, to consider humanity’s impact on the Baltic Sea, confront ecological catastrophe, and muse on the anthropocene.

Later, back on dry land, we head to HAM for the rest o9f the Biennial, where things are no less fantastical – in fact, it’s almost as if a mythological creature has escaped the island to lie in wait for us there. This is Estonian Bita Razavi’s kinetic sculpture, Kratt, whose beginnings can be found in the folklore of the artist’s homeland, and one that requires three drops of its master’s blood to be given as a gift to the devil in order for it to come ‘alive’. Taking the form of a sprawling mechanised arachnid printing press, it represents both servitude and, in its reach, the spreading of a colonial worldview.

When last we visited Finland, the UK was (unbelievably it felt back then as now) in the throes of Brexit and leaving the EU, and this time, Finland had recently joined NATO – seismic geopolitical shifts both. So it seemed fitting that we’d travelled from Liverpool – whose recent Biennial was “addressing the history and temperament” of a city haunted by the transatlantic slave trade, and what was once referred to as the second city of the British Empire – to Helsinki, undertaking, through art and artists (and an evolving population), its own reckoning with people and politics.

Each of these festivals of contemporary art wrestled with issues whose implications are both local and global. It’s art’s job to respond to, contend with, and to challenge. Neither Liverpool nor Helsinki lacks artists. Neither should they be found lacking in response to the most pressing concerns of our times.

Mike Pinnington

Images from top: Ateneum galleries, Helsinki. Stairway and studios in Academy of Fine Arts Main Building Mylly, University of the Arts Helsinki. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Aino Myth triptych, 1891, Ateneum. Mike Pinnington on Vallisaari island, for Helsinki Biennial, and ferry. All photography by Laura Robertson, 2023, apart from second from last: Emilija Skarnulyte, Hypoxia, 2023, Helsinki Biennial 12.6.-17.9.2023, Vallisaari, Helsinki, Photo: © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Kirsi Halkola

With thanks to Finnish Art Agency and Helsinki Partners

“One can use art to create new instruments and different spells.” Mathilde Grandjean takes a trip back to the future to visit the repurposed Bidston Observatory in Birkenhead…

Edward Clive’s morning brew is sometimes accompanied by strangers’ big-eyed faces pressed up against the glass of his window at the Bidston Observatory. Though it can be startling, he understands people’s wonder and curiosity at the incongruous, almost alien-looking building. Fort-like, twin-domed, partly hidden by thick woodland, and sitting at one of the highest points of the Wirral peninsula, there certainly is a magnetic aura about the place. Walk through its doors, and you will soon find the more time you spend there, the more you are subject to its pull.

“There are lots of quirks to the building,” says Edward, a furniture designer by profession who, along with a small team, runs the Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre – the site’s current occupants. He told me of those oddities as we toured the site: how it is surrounded by a deep moat invisible from the outside, built as a vibrational buffer – originally against disturbances caused to the telescopes by horse-drawn carriages. Or how it doesn’t rest on any foundation; it was dug into the hill when its basements were constructed first, and the excavated sandstone was used to assemble the aboveground structure. “Like the building is rising out of its own material,” Edward said.

Nearly 150 years old, in its heyday the observatory was at the heart of outstanding scientific research; its timekeeping, tidal prediction, and meteorological works formed the internal clock of the British Empire. Yet it isn’t the famous local landmark you might expect. While some history buffs come a long way to visit the site – like the American, self-declared “true fan” who turned out to be Ed’s fierce rival bidder on eBay auctions for old postcards of the building – most people just stroll past it on their Sunday afternoon walks, idly wondering what, if anything, is going on there.

In fact, most people across the region have either forgotten about this place or have never heard of it. Those aware of its existence, however, have long feared for its future after its previous occupants, the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, abandoned the premises in 2004. It was then sold to a local developer who could never figure out what to do with the unusual structure.

Enter Edward and his wife, artist and trauma therapist Fiona James, who first came across the building in 2016. Following a stay with a collective of artists called the Performance Arts Forum, which transformed an old monastery in the French village of St Erme into a communal study and living site, the pair were inspired to import a similar model to the UK. They had been looking all over the country for a site to reproduce the experiment – and their search stopped at Bidston. Back then, the observatory had been intermittently vacant for more than a decade. With its windows boarded up, its revolving domes paralysed by rust, clogged drains, hollow sub-basements and walls munched on by rewilding vegetation, it looked a perfect setting for some creepy urbex vlog or secret séance.

“We couldn’t understand how a building with that significant a history had fallen into such disrepair,” said Edward. “But I remember thinking how perfect it would be to house the project, both practically and contextually.” Subsequently, a group of researchers, artists, and performers from all over the UK joined with Edward and Fiona to buy the property and jump-start the project. It took three years of heavy renovation work and administrative wrangling with local authorities and developers until the reimagined centre could finally open its doors in 2019.

However complicated that process, the concept is simple. A communal study site run by a small team of part-time stewards, BOARC seeks to provide a wide range of practitioners, professional and otherwise, with the space and time they can dedicate to their work. Groups and individuals with a project can stay at the observatory from two nights to a month, paying a nightly fee chosen from a sliding scale depending on what they feel they can afford. No laborious application procedure is required: an email suffices. No expectation of productivity either. Stuck poets, painting beginners, geography students, actors, sound artists, therapists, amateur historians, and other itinerant readers are all welcome to form transient communities at the observatory. The only conditions for the stay are to look after the shared spaces and be mindful of others’ boundaries within them.

“I think there’s meaningful work that happens when people from completely different disciplines bump into each other in the kitchen and have a chat,” said Ed. “To access spaces, tools, and meet different people is a really powerful thing.”

“We know that artistic research as a term is in and of itself a barrier,” said Kym Ward, co-founder and director of the project. “But we stuck to it because it speaks to a process rather than an exhibition. We’re interested in the application, the experimentation and the engineering, in relation to the political and ideological – and how they can’t be separated.”

The Engineering of Spells

One way BOARC carries out this effort is through an ongoing project called the Heritage Education Centre Space (HECS), which encourages artists to foster conversations around the observatory as a former instrument of colonial growth. Compiling archival material, scientific descriptions, and artistic contributions on a wiki, its name’s acronym phonetically evokes “hex” – or spell: an element of language with the power to manifest a certain reality upon utterance. That’s because HECS looks at how the design and use of certain scientific instruments have altered our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world.

Take time, for instance. Time as we know it today: linear, chronological, split-second accurate. This is a product of 19th-century time-keeping sciences, of observing planets and stars using telescopes and imaginary lines called meridians. Time was key to the success of Britain’s maritime industry, serving as a referent to map out the surface of the earth, regulate international trade, and accelerate the expansion of British authority over foreign territories. Time isn’t just data – it’s a global software with meaningful implications. And, like every software, it relies on physical components to operate and exist: the hardware – observatories like Bidston’s.

“That level of architectural innovation has an effect on the bodies and psyches of the people who are citizens,” said Kym, who also conducts research into the observatory’s history. “This is how you can tell colonialism exists on a molecular level, on an organic level, and on a psychic level.”

To challenge this reality and bring forth other worlds, one can use art to create new instruments and different software/spells – to enable other ways of knowing and living. Within HECS, this work of dissident worldbuilding is nothing if not plural. Like threads of a tapestry that’s never quite complete, it’s picked up, undone, and redone by the variously experienced hands of those passing by and through.

“Community is only as strong as the people who tell its history and folklore,” said Kym. “That, I guess, is the spell in HECS. It happens or it doesn’t – it depends if people want to tell it. But whatever spell it would be, it would come through the voices of many, not just one.”

The Quieting

In January last year, during my first stay at the observatory, I met Maeve, a sound artist and one of those voices. With a background in punk, experimental, and DIY music, she contributes to the observatory’s very own radio show, Domes FM, which broadcasts on Wednesday evenings.

Along with other poets and performers, Maeve and I had joined in the Spellcraft & Poetry Weekend at the observatory. She launched the festivities on the Friday evening with her first performance as Quieting – her then-new stage name. Set in the eastern dome, the performance consisted of an hour-long composition called Gust Compression.

“I think a lot about systems and the relatedness of everything,” said Maeve, for whom sound is a guiding tool, like a compass in the body, helping her navigate the networks of ceaseless interaction that make up the fabric of the world.

“I think it’s absolutely stunning how everything is held together. But then, how do we locate ourselves within this universe? One way I’ve found is through echoes, reverbs, and repetitions. It’s using sound relationally to look at time – and how we situate ourselves.”

Gust Compression looks at time through sounds carried on the wind. Using records of the observatory’s weather station from December 1905, she translated two-hours’ worth of wind speed, direction, and pressure data points into musical notes – raising the ghosts of past windscapes. Combined with these are live sounds captured inside the weather cabin and on its roof; where looms the metal skeleton of a disused instrument for measuring the speed, force, and direction of the wind called an anemometer – yet another spectre reminding us of the building’s original purpose. Maeve then made a counterpoint melody from the predictive wind data from a week after the live recording. The final composition is an interchange of wind gusts over a 24-hour period – a day’s worth of past, present, and future sounds folding into one another. A musical time paradox, and a reflection of the site itself.

This was Maeve’s way of partaking in what is known within HECS as the “palliative care” of Bidston Observatory – literally caring for something that is dying. Since the opening of BOARC, artists have been theorising and practising means to care for the building and instruments so that the imperialist meanings – the spells – attached to them deteriorate and pass, making space for change. Other histories, other presents, other futures. These practices call, not for a forsaking of, but for a creative reappropriation of the instruments that enabled colonialism.

“It’s about not putting things on plinths and behind glass but letting them be where they were and letting them degenerate,” said Maeve. “It’s not being careless with stuff, but letting it be what it is until it isn’t anymore.”

Asked why she chose the name Quieting, Maeve replied she was not sure – that she didn’t, in fact, choose the name. That she let a book fall open, pointed her finger at the page with her eyes closed, and there it was: quieting. But I was puzzled by a musician’s embrace of silence. Then Maeve read a line from Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations: “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” And something unravelled from that moving image: the quieting. This, too, could be about relatedness and interdependence. Sounds need silence to carry. Things sometimes deteriorate and pass before they can transform. The observatory is a remnant of Empire – a living dead. But by engaging with its passing, the artists of BOARC have turned it into an incubation vat, too. A place where the gentle quieting of past clamours enables different voices to emerge. Voices that can spell out the words for a different world.

Words and images, Mathilde Grandjean

Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, Wilding Way, Birkenhead, Prenton CH43 7RA

Find out more about BOARC, book a tour, or stay and use the facilities for research or studies

On a recent visit to Nantes to see Voyage à Nantes and the ‘Island of Machines’, the more sinister story of a missing man unfolds, reports Denise Courcoux…

I first saw it as I arrived into Nantes on the airport shuttle bus. In white spray-painted letters that filled the height of the wall alongside of the riverbank: Où est Steve? A question even my limited French could easily translate, but not understand straight away.

Formerly a major port with thriving shipbuilding and food industries, Nantes –a city situated on the Loire River in western France – is a classic example of post-industrial regeneration through culture. The factory that once produced its petits beurres biscuits is now Le Lieu Unique, a slick contemporary arts centre. The remaining dockyard cranes now tower over an island of fantastical mechanical creatures, including a 12-metre-high wooden elephant that lumbers around the site, hosing down hot, excitable crowds. This is the creation of La Machine, the company whose robotic spider La Princesse crawled over Liverpool – another port city navigating its way out of years of decline – as part of its European Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008. Liverpool’s relationship with Nantes has continued throughout the last decade with three hugely popular visits from Nantes-based Royal de Luxe’s giant marionettes.

It was due in part to this cultural kinship that I travelled to Nantes from Liverpool in July. The annual Voyage à Nantes arts festival had recently kicked off its eighth edition, with a trail sprawling over 12km, covering special exhibitions at the city’s galleries and an impressive number of commissions, mostly by French artists, in the public realm. Stand anywhere in the city centre and the likelihood is you’ll spot something incongruous. The exposed ghost of a 15th-century chimney breast, picked out in candy-bright orange, pink and green by Flora Moscovici. In a church courtyard, a deep, low hum emanates from a white boulder; one of a series of works by Cécile Beau in the Passage Sainte-Croix. The most successful commissions are those that respond to the various types of architecture and civic spaces that co-exist in a city of mixed fortunes like Nantes; subtle disruptions that draw attention to the fabric of the place.

Then there it was again, sprayed in black, curving handwriting across a footbridge: Où est Steve? I wondered to myself, Qui est Steve? Is it someone’s graffiti tag, or a cultural reference that’s alien to me, like the grinning Monsieur Chat murals I’d enjoyed spotting in Paris a few years ago? As I settled into the city, I began to notice it everywhere – mostly on pieces of white, photocopied A4 paper, taped to anything that would hold them.

On my second afternoon, I walked along the bank of the Loire to cross the bridge over to Rezé, and Le Corbusier’s hulking Maison Radieuse: a 1950s concrete apartment block that looks better up close, when bright colour blocks pop out of its balconies, than from a distance. The riverside was hot, exposed and deserted, just a couple of minutes away from the families at Les Machines de l’Île. Along the path, between the river and the sun-scorched grass, more lettering had been sprayed. Crudely translating as I walked, it quickly became apparent that something terrible had happened here. ‘The Loire kills, so does the police.’ Chalked arrows on the ground pointed towards the expanse of brown water, with no barrier between.

A young woman was being interviewed by a reporter outside a small, solitary shed of a building. Painted on its wall was an image of Steve: a man in his twenties, tall and slightly gawky, wearing glasses, t-shirt and an uncertain smile. A typical informal snapshot of a young guy. I found an English translation of the events I’d been piecing together on a poster later on:

‘Since June 21st, Steve Maia Caniço is missing following a violent police intervention during the night of the “fête de la musique” (music festival), Quai Wilson, in Nantes. Several people were attacked (bludgeoning, LBD 40, tear gas, police dogs), with the reason that the music broadcast schedule would have been exceeded by half an hour. Twelve young people, in panic, fell in the Loire. Since then, Steve Maia Caniço, 24, has not reappeared.

‘If the methods of intervention of the Police Commissioner in charge of operations that night were challenged within the police itself, the Prefect of Loire-Atlantique has shown no empathy towards the victims. The whole political class, local as national, seems walled in silence (with few exceptions). We ask the question to all those responsible: # Where is Steve?’

As a form of protest, Où est Steve? is both affecting and sharply effective. Nantes’ citizens are refusing to let an injustice be quietly forgotten. Où est Steve? demands answers and accountability in three short words. It is unmissable and inescapable throughout the city. During my short stay I spotted new posters being taped up by young people, mobilised and united in outrage. Bold, black text on white copier paper, in its most ubiquitous form it is easy and cheap to mass-produce; a democratic protest that anyone can participate in, whether directly affected by the events of 21 June or not. The debris of earlier, unconnected protests by the ‘gilets jaunes’ is a visible reminder of a more widespread discontent with authorities across France, most notably at the city’s McDonald’s. It serves up burgers behind boarded windows, its golden arches smashed and crowned with paint spatter.

Où est Steve? merged with the Voyage à Nantes in Place Royale, which hosts an installation by artist Stéphane Vigny. Surrounding the square’s ornate central fountain are hundreds of statues and urns; copies of classical sculptures, of the type often found in suburban gardens. It is an allusion to the fact that Place Royale is itself a replica, having been destroyed during the Second World War and then restored almost identically. Here, more Où est Steve? posters had been fixed to the fronts of many of the statues, converting them into standard-bearers for the cause. A taped-up notice nearby stressed that no artworks had been damaged in this intervention of protest into an artistic intervention of place.

Since my return from Nantes, a body, sadly, has been retrieved from the Loire; it was confirmed, more than five weeks after his disappearance, to be that of Steve Maia Caniço. An official enquiry found no link between the police’s actions and the young man’s death. A subsequent demonstration against police brutality and the perceived cover-up was met with tear gas, but Où est Steve? indicates that the questions surrounding the untimely death of Steve Maia Caniço will not be quashed or fade away in a hurry.

Denise Courcoux

Images from top: Les Machines del ’île; Où est Steve?; Stéphane Vigny, Reconstituer (feature and bottom). All images courtesy Denise Courcoux, 2019

Ice skating rink stunts, underground culture and opportunism. At Berlin’s festival dedicated to electronic, digital and experimental music, Jacob Bolton finds cynical cool-hunting, but also fertile ground, rich with pushed boundaries… 

On pretty much day one of CTM 2019, Resident Advisor ran this gem of a headline: “CTM Festival’s Berghain ice skating rink not actually ice”. The installation had promised the chance to skate to a lineup of DJs playing everything from ambient to jungle throughout the day in Berlin’s notoriously selective überclub, and had captured 14,000 Facebook-interested imaginations, according to the event page. In response, the organisers of the sprawling expo of experimental and underground art and music released this statement:

“Over the weekend, we’ve received a few messages from guests who expressed their disappointment regarding the skating experience at Halle am Berghain. We are aware that the synthetic ice surface being used doesn’t deliver a fully satisfying skating experience… We are also aware that there were not enough adult skate sizes to meet the current demand.

“… The project has received an enormous amount of feedback, both locally and internationally. What started as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to break up the seriousness often associated with the festival, quickly gained a whole other momentum on its own, largely outshining ten days of music by over 250 artists from over 30 countries.”

Integrity of the ice aside (it’s a festival of synthetically created art and music!), what the statement really betrays is a disconnect between what the organisers see as culturally valuable, and what the hordes of opportunistic cool young Instagram pilgrims understand as value in terms of social capital; between those legitimately seeking to carve out crucial liberating experiences (Berghain has its origins as a haven for queer exploration) and those who are in it to easily check off ‘been to Berghain’ from the hip bucket list, between the reason the underground exists in the first place and its ongoing dilution, being forced to the surface one Facebook check-in at a time.

There’s a kind of cultural war going on here that this disconnect illustrates, between those who create and enable access to music and politically fertile situations through which to rethink our identities and challenge the way we occupy space together, and those that are working to reduce it all down to surface cache, to cultural currency that can be exchanged on the social market. This matters because cultural wars today are really political wars, and the territory that the underground/experimental scene occupies has historically been an incubator for new solidarities and collective identities capable of clearing away the stale and discriminatory hegemonies and homogenies of culture at large. What CTM provided was a site upon which to look at this conflict playing out, a confluence of those experimenting to cut through stifling conventions and those feeding off that bleeding edge.

Case in point: at Croatian Amor’s Berghain gig he played his brand new album Isa in its entirety. It’s a good album: cold, inky, loaded with broken poetry from disembodied voices. It sounds like what corrupted files of ghosts found on an old hard drive might sound like. But the performance was, as a friend pointed out, just a fashion show: Croatian Amor with a laptop feeding the album into a synth and mixer, whilst two models wearing sunglasses and boxfresh hoodies bearing the name of the label (literally called Posh Isolation, €80) sat statue-still. It co-opted the dark, candlelit, cathedrally space of the club – a longtime haven for queer exploration – into a backdrop for an advert.

That same look popped up in the accompanying exhibition Persisting Realities at Kunstraum Kreuzberg too, in a sculpture called Oratorio by Vivian Caccuri. In the piece, a circle of solemn subwoofers faced candles that flicker when the speakers moved into gear. It’s a literalisation of the aesthetic experience of clubbing: subbass moving us, bodies trembling together. But that literalisation is the problem – it’s not art coming from the place that encourages people to build collectivising experiences, it’s just a heavy-handed representation of what one of those experiences looks like. It felt like Berghain had commissioned an expensive portrait of itself.

In another room, veteran turntablists Martin Tétreault and dieb13 presented Graphic Varispeed: documentation of a performance in which copies of a record are made from smearing wood glue over it and waiting for it to harden (a common technique to clean records), and then copies are made of these copies and played in quick series, like a Boiler Room set from Baudrillard. Sonically it was kind of dull though, it’s what you’d imagine wood glue records to sound like, all static and crackle. These were all played on conspicuously expensive turntables with hi-fi needles. Like Oratorio, it was more about the settings – or in this case the gear – that enables the underground, than about the ideas, issues and possibilities that bring it together.

Both pieces displayed another virus in the underground/experimental scene: a retreat into stale aesthetics, into the hardware of a culture’s past, when what we really need is artists opening up new ways of thinking about the wildly disruptive emerging software of the present. On that front, Helena Nikonole’s deus X mchn, tucked away towards the end of the exhibition, delivered. A language-based artificial intelligence trained on the Bible, Quran, Torah, Ramayana and other religious texts generates new scriptural verse, and every 15 minutes spits sheets of it out of a printer in the centre of the room. At the same time, it’s hacking unsecured printers around the world, printing sheets of verse into unwitting offices. Next to the printer, a screen shows hacked footage of CCTV systems connected to unsecure networks being taken over by the AI, with a synthesised human voice invading their speaker systems and delivering AI-generated sermons to train stations, industrial parks, supermarkets, baffling security guards and cashiers worldwide.

It seems kind of brutal on the surface, and there are definitely obvious problems with scaring unwitting workers for the sake of an art project that they will probably not see. But by demonstrating the ease with which our omnipresent surveillance apparatus can be so easily co-opted, it activates an awareness of our over-weaning surveillance culture and encourages precautions that are ultimately in the interests of individuals. It’s not just a piece about a breach of privacy through autonomous means, but an enactment of it, and this is where it draws its power.

The gear fetishism of Oratorio and Graphic Varispeed popped up again in the Raster.Labor exhibition at nGBk. Five artists from the experimental Raster label built sound sculptures from everyday objects (clocks, or cassette players, or furniture), wired up to expensive eurorack synth systems, each laid out sprawling on sterile white backlit tables like cadavers. Conceptually it was sort of interesting – enclosed systems of generative sound production based on hybrid technologies, churning out soundscapes. Yet although they were laid out naked on clinical tables to be read, without a decent knowledge of modular synthesis and sound manipulation, the systems remained illegible, and virtually no attempts were made to enable that access to the uninitiated. It felt like those moments in pre-war novels when characters that have been speaking in English the whole time suddenly break out into French at great length. It’s endemic of an irritating issue in the experimental scene: the propagation of a dedicated, rarefied audience through rewarding the initiated and excluding everyone else.

A much more accessible use of acoustic and electronic technologies took place at the Yair Elazar Glotman and Mats Erlandsson concert at MONOM, Berlin’s Center for Spatial Sound. The two electronic composers were joined by a chamber orchestra, arranged in a circle in the middle of a dark, heavily fogged room. Everyone in attendance sat on the floor or stood around them, all at the same level, all attention in the room focused the same way, reducing the performer/audience divide. The entire concert took place on a raised mesh floor, under which bass speakers nestled, and around and overhead were 16 tall columns forming a 3×3 square grid. Each column had 4 speakers, and the sound engineer played the mixer like a pianist, swirling the sounds of each player around the room, a technology that lifted the performance’s drone-like composition, allowing the texture of the sound to come to the forefront. Unlike a concert hall, in which the music is something that comes at you from a static point, the listening environment created here allowed you to occupy the music, to be inside it together rather than just facing it.

The most adventurous (and most divisive) experiment in new music technologies of the festival was the Actress and Young Paint concert at HKW, in partnership with Transmediale. Actress, the producer who’s made his name through deconstructing and reimagining UK club genres like 2-step and garage, performed an improvised live set with Young Paint, an artificial intelligence trained to emulate Actress’s sound through being fed his music and extrapolating his intuitive sense of texture, melody and rhythm. Actress shuffled onto stage on to a small studio setup, and began playing sparse drum loops, skeletal basslines, long drone notes. Responding to these, the AI would perk up and add something to the composition, pushing it in a new direction. This direction was, most of the time, massively jarring; it wasn’t so much deconstructed club music as club music smashed to bits and stuck back together, like crazy paving. The majority of the performance was stuttered, unsure, kind of lopsided. It would be an omission to not mention that a lot of people got up and left.

But the performance was punctuated by moments where things clicked, where human and AI synchronised and discovered a new sound, or where Young Paint would throw out a curveball musical intervention so leftfield that it took a while to get used to, but once you were into it you knew you were witnessing something legitimately new, unimagined, literally unheard of. Right at the end, just after Actress had left the stage, a synthesised human voice started timidly singing, unsure and broken, like a kid uncertain of who they are singing to. As a concert, it was fragmented and messy. But as an experiment in figuring out our working relationship with artificial intelligence, it was solid: an honest enactment of a fragmented, messy, uncanny relationship, of two entities trying hard to figure each other out. This is, after all, the experimental. It should feel jarring, it should demand effort to recognise ourselves in it. That’s the process through which we disidentify ourselves in order to identify again, on newer terms, and on the verge of an AI-enabled total societal overhaul, it’s something we’re going to have to learn to do a lot more.

Jacob Bolton

Jacob visited CTM Festival, Berlin, earlier this year, “a prominent international festival dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music”.

Images, from top: CTM Festival Eishalle © Camille Blake; Oratorio @ Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien © Udo Siegfried; Helena Nikonole deus X mchn @ Kunsthaus Bethanien © Camille Blake; Home page banner image: Actress & Young Paint at HKW part of CTM and Transmediale © Adam Berry

On a recent trip to Bilbao for the final days of controversial exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, Linda Pittwood found a complex fermentation of global and local politics…

Before you can enter the galleries of Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, you have to navigate the exterior of the building. This can mean being engulfed in by Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.).G.), 1998 by Fujiko Nakaya, listening to several repeats of New York New York played by, if I am kind, a mediocre clarinettist, avoiding buying the unofficial Louise Bourgeois’ spiders spun from wire that seem to crawl from everywhere, or spending way too long trying to get a perfect selfie with Jeff Koons’ Puppy, 1992. But it is also a process of understanding the place and of place-making. Museo Guggenheim has now been open for 21 years. It’s a good time to ask, what impact has the venue had on the city, and what impact does the city have on how we interpret the art within?

It is easy to assume that culture, led by the Guggenheim’s arrival, has reinvigorated the largest city and defacto capital of the Basque country. I visited in a still-warm September, falling in the gap between summer shows and autumn programming. Perhaps because of this I was left feeling that the cultural offer of Bilbao, as the artist collective ZAWP have incorporated into their acronym, is still a work in progress. The more I looked for art, the more I found the closed doors of Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, currently revamping to relaunch next year, or walking for miles along the tangled, steep, intriguing streets of the San Francisco neighbourhood, failing to find SC Gallery + Art Management.

Like many tourists I caught a plane from Manchester one afternoon heading to this autonomous region in northern Spain for the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao (which had 1.3 million international and local visitors in 2017). Specifically, I came to see the exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, in its final days. The exhibition has worked hard, opening at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2017. It weathered a storm of controversy about use of animals in artworks; both animals (insects and lizards) in gallery and animals (copulating pigs) captured in video. New York made concessions.

But possibly a more controversial question was whether the Guggenheim’s response was to spin the events into a PR opportunity and exploit global headlines. The animals are mostly back, except that the lizards populating the eponymous Theater of the World (1993) by Huang Yong Ping are fed their usual diet of insects outside of gallery opening hours rather than as a spectacle for the consumption of viewers.

Art and China after 1989 isn’t a show that slots with curvaceous, immersive ease into the Museo Guggenheim, as Richard Serra’s copper-coloured permanent installation The Matter of Time (1997, pictured above) seems to do so effortlessly. This large show, including the work of more than 60 artists, is complex and context-specific, challenging and fragmentary. For the first time, many of these artists are situated within the two main Guggenheim venues, which together crudely form the axis of Western 20th century modern art: Picasso to Warhol. These venues are the underpinnings of a canon that Chinese art, along with contemporary artworks the world over, both reinforce and subvert.

Whilst modern art was ‘happening’ in Europe and America, Mainland China was ‘closed.’ Communism under Chairman Mao controlled art, culture, gender, politics, daily life and economies of information. This gives contemporary Chinese art its own particular trajectory, processing a legacy of trauma, ascending from China’s own early-20th-century modernism and now fully part of complex-connected globalization. 21st century China is a Communist country with capitalist characteristics, and its own specific “stakes” as opaquely put by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and co-curator of the show. The stakes are alluded to in the gallery interpretation of Art and China after 1989 but not always unpacked.

The show is framed by the end of the cold war and the Beijing Olympics in 2008. My understanding of 1989 is that it was only one date within a process of the cold war dismantling; whilst within China it vaguely marked a decade on from the death of Chairman Mao and the re-introduction of a market-led economy. Significantly, it was a year that began with optimism for contemporary artists in the PRC, with tacit acceptance for their practice demonstrated by being permitted to stage temporary exhibitions. But only a few months later the massacre of protesters at Beijing’s landmark Tiananmen Square renewed suspicion towards experimental art strategies, leading artists to de-politicize their work and to produce exhibitions in apartments and artist communities. The implicitly-political framing of Art and China after 1989 is perhaps what has leant it a sombre palette. The show is a world apart from the carnival atmosphere (‘inauteri giroa’ in Euskara, the language of the Basque country) outside the gallery walls at the Museo.

Some things are, arguably, missing from the exhibition. It is unclear whether female artists were marginalized because of the framing of the show or for some other reason. Many important artists are either not here (Cui Xiuwen, Xing Danwen, Chen Lingyang, Xiao Lu, to name but four) or unrepresentative pieces by them have been chosen (Kan Xuan, Lin Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen and Cao Fei). The latter group make bigger, more nuanced and funnier work than the examples you see in this show. In Lin Tianmiao’s Sewing (1997), a thread-wound sewing machine is a thrill to see in its precise tactile flesh. Kan Xuan’s KanXuan Ai! (1999) video is best seen in the gallery, because the artist is concerned with every aspect of the presentation of her works.

Meanwhile of the men: Ai Wei Wei is here dropping his pot and with it laying down questions about authenticity, value and cultural identity. Xu Zhen’s gaze in Rainbow (1999) focuses on the harm that unseen violence has left behind. Zhang Peili’s hand scratches furiously, repeatedly. And Qiu Zhijie (below) ostensibly gives us a map to understanding, but ultimately demonstrates that curatorial practice and cartography are both disciplines of omission as much as representation.

Towards the end of the exhibition, the pressure to contextualise and to explain the relationships between artists and movements becomes heightened and threatens to drown out works that should have been given more air. Cao Fei’s RMB City (2007), a work that blurs the lines between life, second life, documentary, internet and gallery-based art, is confined to a corner between resources such as interviews on video screens, copies of publications and other methods of exhibition/art history making.

Before I left the Museo, the communications team at the gallery urged me to look at another temporary exhibition, Joana Vasconceloa’s I’m Your Mirror. They described the work as “visual”. However, Vasconceloa’s multi-sensory-maximalism only serves to underscore the impossibility of communicating the complexity and extent of 20 years of contemporary art from China in one show, even before you try to fit it into the global picture by exhibiting at two very differently-toned Guggenheim museums. Perhaps the team wanted me to get a better sense of the city itself than Art and China after 1989 could offer.

In fact, it was only after I abandoned my pursuit of art that I was free to enjoy Bilbao for its many other strengths. Mostly this was food, with many vegan choices available. I wrote notes for this article sat on a bar stool at Pizzeria Trozo eating a most enormous houmous and courgette pizza, drinking a Boga garagardoa craft beer produced by a local cooperative, and feeling overwhelmingly content. I had excellent coffee at Bihotz Café and ascended the mountainside using the Artxanda Funicular (cable car) for panoramic views of the city, glistening and perfect in the September heat.

Outside of Museo Guggenheim and Art and China after 1989, I did not enter a space devoid of covert political messaging. Spain’s political divides are threatening destabilization here in the Basque Country, and Catalonia to the south east. The appeal for Basque independentzia, communicated through howls of graffiti and the resurgence of its local (isolated) language Euskara, is a cold steely edge to an otherwise relaxed and city. A frosted edge to a leaf in 34°C. The Guggenheim can bring people to the city, but this venue cannot (and should not) change the nature of the city on its own, nor can a gallery play panacea. The city of Bilbao may not permanently leave its trace upon the Chinese artworks that came to be here temporarily. However, its impact on my understanding of these works will remain; exemplifying the political edge that exists to every seemingly innocuous act, and the equal importance of considering both what is included and what is left out.
Linda Pittwood

Images from top: Sarah Morris’ film Beijing (2008); Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time (1997); Chen Zhen’s Precipitous Parturition (1999); Qiu Zhijie’s Map of Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. All images from Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, courtesy Linda Pittwood 

On a trip to Toronto to visit public realm art festival Nuit Blanche, Mike Pinnington finds a common thread emerges, of words and the power they wield… 

‘Less sleep, more art’ is the slogan for Nuit Blanche in Toronto, and the free, one-night-only contemporary art festival is now in its thirteenth year. But after a long flight, and immediately being whisked off to meet city of Toronto dignitaries and Nuit Blanche associated-folk, the first part of its slogan is proving apt already.

My first truly cognitive experiences of this north American city began in earnest the next day. We started early, with a walking tour through so-called graffiti alley: a great way to immerse yourself in the city’s downtown fashion district and crib a bit of local knowledge. Here, the close-knit scene’s members trade social comment and retorts amongst themselves, commenting on everything from the late Mayor Ford to whether or not doing a mural for a local conglomerate counts as selling out these days. As gentrified as this might sound – there’s even official signage telling us this is Graffiti Alley – as our guide Jason points out, at the outset, graffiti was a way to “battle, and settle scores without resorting to violence”. The act itself is often as, or more, important than the results, he says; we chat about how this reminds me of Yves Klein’s pronouncement that his paintings were but the ashes of his artwork. The important thing, the real beauty, was in the act of doing, of making the statement.

And, of course, words and text in the right (or indeed wrong) hands are powerful tools. Words, it shouldn’t be forgotten, carry weight, something artists are keenly aware of. Just prior to my arrival in Toronto, artist and activist Robin Bell  was busy projecting accusations surrounding Brett Kavanaugh, then Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, on to the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse (Kavanaugh’s place of business in Washington DC). These included “Brett Kavanaugh Is a Sexual Predator”; somehow though, in these strange times, the muck – indelible as it seemed – didn’t stick.

Next day, on the eve of Nuit Blanche, we made the trip out to Scarborough, a district located in the eastern part of the city. More usually associated with its ethnically diverse community (and the wealth of amazing eateries those communities have brought with them) than it is with art, it feels on the fringes – geographically and otherwise. Indeed, this year’s Nuit Blanche is the first in which this part of Toronto features. As if to acknowledge the previous lack, the event’s press launch takes place here, in a huge mall, so as to reach as many of the previously disenfranchised as possible. Less inflammatory than Bell’s Kavanaugh allegations, though no less of a statement, is Hiba Abdallah’s EVERYTHING I WANTED TO TELL YOU, 2018, a four-channel text installation projected directly on to Scarborough’s Civic Centre. Abdallah worked with artists and others in the community to tease out sentiments important to her collaborators, producing a set of statements, questions and observations, such as “Why are people so regional”, “It was ten stories tall. It had some seriously colonial vibes to it”, and “People are backing one another because we want to see each other win.” An immediate and potent combination of social comment and positivity, it indicates that the sense of ‘other’ traditionally felt by this community is also something that binds it. It also suggests that when those occupying the hinterlands are invited to the table, great things can happen.

French-Tunisian street artist el SeeD, who had work in different parts of Toronto, is another whose practice is embedded in words and language. Speaking at the press conference, he said that he uses “Arabic calligraphy as a medium …”, asserting that “art is a tool to create bridges between people”. His multipart installation Mirrors of Babel, commissioned for the festival, proposes an inversion of the Babel legend, so that instead of peoples being separated by difference, the intent here is to foreground the reality; those “complex interactions of Indigenous and immigrant voices within Canada”. An event that lives and dies by the participation of its audience, on the night the city voted with its feet, an estimated one million flooding the streets, squares and subway past midnight. A colleague observed that at Nuit Blanche, it’s this that constitutes the artwork; people coming together across Toronto, to engage with contemporary art in a meaningful way, perhaps for the first time.

If first timers liked what they found there, they could do worse than take the bus out to the recently reopened (and relocated) Museum of Contemporary Art which, says Executive Director and CEO, Heidi Reitmaier, “needs to be ground breaking”. The aim, Reitmaier stresses, is to “be a ‘listening museum’, a welcoming place where artists and their work pose provocative questions”. Coincidentally, Abdallah pops up here, too, alongside Justin Langlois on a floor dedicated to a year-long programme exploring arte util – the idea that proposes that art be useful and effective. Their work Rehearsing Disagreement, 2018, situates art and the museum as a medium by which to investigate conflict. Including, among other audience-activated works, a seesaw asking participants – by actually getting on the thing – to decide whether or not “Things have never been better”, it makes for a playful, engaging and thought-provoking installation. The Art in Use  changing programme includes a project by Useful Art founder Tania Bruguera next year.

Elsewhere, across two floors of the museum is BELIEVE, displays made up of 16 artists whose works in various media (including sculpture, video, installation, film, collage, printmaking, painting, photography, animation and performance) consider belief and perception, and what we judge to be representative of “truth”. Overlooking one end of a floor, is (Untitled) Doubt + Belief, by that famed exploiter of mainstream mass communication techniques, Barbara Kruger. Made this year, and refreshingly analogue, the work mimics the billboard aesthetic of consumer culture to simply ask that we remain, or introduce an element of, circumspection into our credulity. In statement and scale, Kruger demonstrates again the power of information, and the complacency with which we too often relate to it.

On my final day in Toronto, I just have time to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) before heading to the airport. Amid the free-to-enter collection displays (including modern, contemporary, indigenous and Canadian), works by General Idea – the Toronto-based collective formed in 1969 – and Frances Stark served to prove, if proof were needed, the seductive immediacy of language. General Idea’s AIDS, 1988, sought to apply Robert Indiana’s pop aesthetic to campaign for the awareness (and against the stigma) of AIDS and HIV. Two members of the collective, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, died of AIDS-related illness in 1994. Frances Stark’s 2013 work Don’t Save Her, meanwhile, depicts the artist pasting up violent and misogynistic lyrics from rapper Project Pat’s song of the same name, blurring the boundaries of popular culture and the gallery, as mediated by the artist.

In this age of polemics, often knee-jerk calling out and trolling, words such as mediated, and mediation, have perhaps become a little lost. But many of the works mentioned above more than make the case for text and language-inspired art eloquently. Of course, art in any form can help us to tell and make sense of stories. Sometimes, as with Abdallah’s nuanced EVERYTHING I WANTED TO TELL YOU, this is to reflect on and expose truths, while others still wield it as a weapon to engage those on the edges, or to spread messages of hope and unite communities. Whatever the cause or motivation, art continues to tell a many textured, sometimes interwoven, sometimes fragmented tale. At Nuit Blanche, and beyond, it speaks to these different narrative threads, threads that converge and reveal friction, challenges and issues, but also hints at resolution, and the commonalities we share. Art, more than ever before, must be a place where everyone’s story can be heard.

Mike Pinnington

Mike flew with Air Canada and stayed at the Kimpton Saint George hotel     

Images from top:

Hiba Abdallah and Justin Langlois, ‘Striking a Balance – Rehearsing Disagreement’, 2018. Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Hiba Abdallah, Nuit Blanche 2018. Photo by Mike Pinnington.

Barbara Kruger, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. Photo by Mike Pinnington.

Laura Robertson recalls a disorientating visit to Turkey’s ancient city during a time of crisis…

Your hotel room overlooks an enormous crater. It’s where Istanbul Modern art gallery used to be. Some giant hand scooped it out, its nails scraping a hole for something else – another hotel, a shopping mall. Tiny men in high vis clothes freckle the site; you’re reminded of Fraggle Rock. One slowly ascends a spindly crane as if it were the mast of a ship; 100 feet of nothingness below, and beyond that, The Bosphorus. Frothy with criss-crossing tug boats, cargo ships, ferries, twinkling with lights. How often do they collide? The grey strait is shouldered by two continents; your window frames Asian Turkey on the left, European Turkey on the right, spiny with minarets and skyscrapers, hugging the view. Dead ahead, the neck of the bay extends into mist; the Marmara Sea is there but you can’t see it. The water slams over the crater’s fortified wall. Traffic hisses.

You walk under terracotta roofs, mosque domes and castle walls. Graffiti. Cafes and tulip-lined boulevards. Women are in leggings and boots and duffel coats, but you’ve brought a suitcase full of summer dresses. The call to prayer doesn’t help keep track of time, it confuses you; a high crackle cutting through conversations and phone calls and car rides, making the day feel shorter. You are astonished at how busy it is. It feels like a gateway, because it is; zooming out to a thin bridge between Turkey and Bulgaria. The flags remind you where you are: glorious primary red draping from windows, wind-whipped and plastered to food stalls and offices and your hotel. Half of the flags feature the President, looking up to the light. Insulting him carries a four year jail term.

The artist you’ve come here to meet talks about a time of crisis. Domestic aggression. No hope for the future. Of useless, redundant activity and of restlessness. Something’s wrong in his artwork – sweetness overlaying toxicity. He shows you a film of hands washing roses, repetitively, and you imagine the stench of the dead; in another, a woman boddles about in her living room, which turns out in the end to be housed within an MDF house nailed precariously onto a ramshackle boat; his photograph of a performance of a protest transforms into a real riot, and gallery visitors avert their eyes. There’s no safety or reassurance in his work, only illusion. He doesn’t care if he goes to jail, he says, they may come for him.

On your last day, the heat hangs in a haze over the bay. There are just as many ships out today, even more, little fishing boats too, and you think about what the fishermen catch to eat or sell. It looks dangerous. The flag flaps against the pane. The crane lifts a bunch of tied steel rods majestically into the air and across your view, sweeping the site below. The ceaseless buzzing and clanging. The chaos, the people, busy working and busy always, the city spreads out. Sea birds swoop, hang on a gust as if paused, feathers tremble; drop. The taxi arrives and you speed past flickering images, your Istanbul zoetrope: scuffed telephone boxes shaped like jumping dolphins; a bike store beneath an underpass, where women in black niqab stand next to pink tricycles and Treks; crumbling ramparts pockmarked with age; Nutella adverts and fashion models; terraces decorated with potted greenery; empty apartment blocks covered with orange tarpaulin, shaped like toast racks; a shipyard, dry boats stacked up high, a moored ferry; “Big Boss Lasagne”; huge cherry blossoms lining the motorway. You remember seeing a dusty cat eating a sausage, a lukániko, in the middle of the street, and wonder where all the stray animals disappear to at night.

Laura Robertson

Niki Russell boards a ferry in order to reach the Young Artists Biennale in Albania, and finds that the festival’s larger themes — of history, conflict, dreams and failure — stimulate dialogue between different cultures…

Mediterranea 18 was the latest iteration of the Young Artists Biennale, a nomadic multi-disciplinary format that brought together hundreds of artists with the intention of promoting dialogue and collaboration. This itinerant gathering is organised by BJCEM (Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée) – a loose network made up of 59 members from countries across Europe – and encompasses a dizzying array of cultural production including cinema, music, food, art, theatre, dance and literature.

The 18^th edition of the Biennale was held for the first time in Albania, between the capital Tirana and the port city of Durrës (4-9 May, 2017). However, for artists, press and partners the event actually began with a somewhat perplexing detour via Bari – in the Puglia region of Italy – for a pre-Biennale event. Arriving part way through the press conference might have placed me at a disadvantage, but judging by other bemused faces around the room I was not the only one still seeking elucidation on the exact matter in hand. Why were we here, in this theatre – in the industrial hinterland of Bari? A large group of curators, partners, artists and politicians, took it in turns to voice approbatory remarks – both in relation to this particular Biennale and its history more broadly. The group were seated on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Juan Sandoval’s furniture-cum-installation Mar Mediterraneo – Sedie Love Difference; comprising sixty chairs that together form the shape of the Mediterranean, and intended to create a speculative arena to stimulate dialogue between different cultures.

As the conversation reached the Biennale’s theme History + Conflict + Dream + Failure = HOME, one historical point of reference for beginning our journey in Puglia, is that of the Tragedy of Otranto – where in 1997 the boat Katër i Radës, carrying refugees fleeing Albania, capsized in a collision with an Italian vessel, resulting in the death of many of those aboard. This moment in history draws attention to the bonds that connect the people of Puglia and Albania, by remembering this tragic incident, but also posits new relationships that are necessary for reconsidering Europe and the Mediterranean today. This journey was re-presented physically, as we left Puglia that same evening aboard the overnight ferry from Bari to Durrës. A performative discussion promised to probe and elaborate on the themes of the Biennale, but frustratingly quickly fell back on ground covered in the earlier press conference. I therefore chose to leave the discussion behind to explore the other accessible spaces on the ferry. In doing so, it was difficult not to see a missed opportunity to use this journey as a further site for the Biennale. Nestled at the rear of the ferry on the upper deck, regular passengers – largely native Albanians – picnicked and socialised around fixed tables. This convivial public space is separated from the private Mediterranea 18 event below, but gradually the two overlapped as more Biennale passengers emerged out onto deck to continue conversations and drink late into the night.

The next morning after a coach ride from Durrës we arrived in Tirana for the inaugural event, with the official programme of 230 selected artists offering an extensive daily programme of music, film, performance and literary offerings across the two cities. One-off, live events interspersed my journey to reach the visual arts programme, which was sited in five main venues – at the National Historical Museum (pictured, above), National Gallery of Arts, Former Embassy of Yugoslavia, Youth Centre and the House of Leaves. With the latter two of these venues quite slight, the majority of the work was housed within the remaining triumvirate, with the most engaging of these being the Former Embassy of Yugoslavia. This empty shell of a building, with bare walls and concrete floors, broken windowpanes and upturned grand piano, was refilled with objects of domesticity and layered with other spaces transferred onto this architecture.

Andre Fama’s cement sculptures lean casually against the walls, and resemble casts of another place, architectural support structures relocated from one space to another. In Margarethe Drexel’s video her body performs the rooms that make up an unknown house; these strange acts seek to defamiliarise the space, and the objects contained within, challenging the social conventions of the home. Further extraction and layering of external landscapes can be seen in Lidija Delic’s Sunset Journeys, where small landscape paintings merge with the columns and rows of account ledger paper. On top of these sunsets, stripes of correction fluid serve both to blank out textual description and to create a void to later be filled. Theodoulos Polyviou’s Radiator and Supporting Grab Rail play with the materiality of domestic space, inserting anomaly and convolution into otherwise familiar architectural furniture – as the functionality of a safety device receives an aestheticised flourish, and the pipes of a radiator contort into knots. Austrian group Jurgen Kleft ask us to think again about the meaning of shelter, through a more temporary form of housing – that of distorted camping equipment. Gathered around the old fireplace at the former embassy sit a collection of sculptural objects, some proffer semi-functionality as a jacket, rucksack or tent, whilst others such as Obelisk Laterne start to take on ceremonial purpose. Together these objects appear to function as set and prop for some performance yet to come.

Video and sound feature strongly across the visual arts at the Biennale, exemplified in works by Faxen (pictured, above) and Siniša Radulović, which are located in adjoining rooms at the Former Embassy of Yugoslavia. In Austrian collective Faxen’s Transposition a slowly rotating microphone moves in and out of range of portable radios each tuned into a different frequency, picking up broken snippets of spoken language, the faint trace of musical fragments and the crackle of static. This sonic experiment with everyday domestic equipment presents an evolving soundscape as it fades in and out, and begins to blend the language and tone of different stations from around the world – subtlely referencing the emigrant countries of the Albanian diaspora. Siniša Radulović’s video Indivisible and Inseparable presents a continually shifting collage of video clippings. This desktop of overlapping source material is accompanied by a spoken monologue combining generic political speeches and national mythologies with trivia and misuse of statistics: “10,763 birds die each year smashing into windows”. With its lack of linear narrative the work speculates on the future of former Eastern Bloc countries – such as the Radulović’s native Montenegro – where the promise of progress, of a transition to a market economy is filled with empty rhetoric, and where the dominant voice becomes a mantra, like the endless hum of a self-improvement tape.

Participation in Mediterranea 18 is in part determined by nationality, with artists selected and brought to the Biennale by national partner organisations that make up BJCEM. Whilst this does not necessitate that artists from a particular country are shown together – there are certain groupings that emerge, such as on the ground floor of the Former Embassy of Yugoslavia where there is a strong representation from both Austria and Montenegro. The majority of partners are from countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea – as the name of both the Biennale and the lead organisation would suggest – but there are also partners from countries further afield, such as UK Young Artists. The UK contingent at this edition were visual artists Ant Hamlyn and Conor Rogers (pictured, below), alongside Maryam Tafakory, Toby Campion, Jamal Sterrett and Sadegh Aleahmad, featuring respectively in the film, literary and performance sections of the programme. Displayed at the National Gallery of Arts, Conor Rogers’ intricate paintings depict scenes of people’s everyday lives applied to banal objects – such as the surface of a scouring pad, the label of a medicine bottle or the exterior of small plastic “baggies”. Ant Hamlyn’s inflatable structure is installed at the National Historical Museum, where the The Boost Project encourages audiences to follow/like/tag via social media in order to contribute to its growth – resulting in a form that can be swollen like a ripe pumpkin, or as likely to be crumpled in a heap through inattention.

Further video works that stood out at the National Historical Museum were Vangjush Vellahu’s Fragments and Nicolas Vamvouklis’ And It Feels Like Home II. Vellahu’s multi-channel video installation is part of an ongoing series that document the existence of unrecognised states – in this instance shot in Abkhazia, Varosha and Agdam. These videos feature interviews with people who live in these states, whilst visually dwelling on the particular architecture in each location. As the camera pans across abandoned buildings we are urged to consider the memories that are embedded in each of them, as well as being confronted with the state of limbo or frozen conflict that exists in each place. In contrast, Vamvouklis’ short video loop is a fixed shot of a building on a lake at Berlin Zoo. Seen through the large window, it focuses on the life of a group of flamingos contained inside – who have been relocated in response to the outbreak of H5N8 flu in Germany (sometimes called bird flue virus). This strangely unsettling scene reflects in a different way on issues of dominance, control and freedom of movement.

As a showcase for artists working across Europe at this moment in time, the event succeeded in making visible artists’ practices not currently well-known outside of their home countries. However, the experience of attending left questions about the function of the Biennale – what does it do for the artists involved? And for the city that hosts it? The venues for the Biennale are either in non-art spaces, disused buildings, or in-between spaces at Galleries and Museums. Sometimes this adds a further dimension to the installation, as with the Former Embassy of Yugoslavia, but at other times the siting of work felt awkward or ill-considered. Despite being widely marketed across the city the event struggled to connect with a wider audience beyond those directly connected to the Biennale. In one sense, this highlights the lack of visual arts infrastructure in Albania, with few galleries or institutions focused on contemporary art. There are few non-profit art spaces in the city, one of the few I visited whilst there was Tirana Art Lab – an independent space offering a diverse programme of exhibitions, residencies and research activity. In conversation, it became clear that they felt a lack of criticality in the city, an issue that they had a desire to change by connecting Albanian artists with those in the immediate Balkan region as well as further afield across Europe.

In this context, what role could, or should, the Biennale have taken in contributing to the development of a critical infrastructure in the city? Albanian artists were strongly represented, in number, within the programme, and therefore for those participating the Biennale it offered a concrete opportunity to connect with peers across Europe. Having initially been “conceived as a multi-disciplinary meeting”, the Biennale clearly still performs this function, and many of the artists involved expressed excitement in the opportunity to connect not just internationally but also across disciplines – and for them the experience was about much more than simply the presentation of work. It therefore feels important that the Biennale is able to more fully communicate this aspect of what the event does – the intangible benefits to those involved.

Niki Russell

Niki saw Mediterranea 18 between 4–9 May 2017 in Tirana and Durrës, Albania

For more information, see Mediterranea 18 and BJCEM (Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée)

All images courtesy of artists and BJCEM 

Why is it that hyperrealistic depictions of the human form are so unsettling? Pete Goodbody travels to Denmark to experience unnervingly realistic sculpture at ARKEN… 

Designed to resemble a beached ship, the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art presents as a striking figure on the coastline of Koge Bay: a 25-minute metro ride from the centre of Copenhagen, in Denmark.

But not all is quite what you’d expect from an average art gallery. ARKEN’s permanent collection is deliberately curated without theme, style, or apparent direction; designed to make the viewer ask questions about art, and evaluate perceptions as to what counts as art. It’s an uplifting, even joyful experience, with some genuinely funny moments.

Given the recent antics at polling stations in the UK, a highlight was Elmgreen and Dragset’s depiction of a broken Administration office staircase, entitled Social Mobility (2005—present). Clever, witty and imaginative, this piece seemed to sum up the overall curation without actually explaining it.

There’s a room devoted to Damien Hirst, and another given over to Ai Weiwei’s 12 depictions of the signs of the Chinese Zodiac – his touring Zodiac Heads – currently on extended loan until 2019. The fact that ARKEN manages to attract such big names is an indication of just how good this gallery is.

And then there’s Gosh! Is It Alive?: ARKEN’s temporary exhibition (see it until 6 August) of 39 human body sculptures, nearly all of which were unnervingly realistic. It isn’t easy to rationalise why a life-like depiction of the human form is so very much more unsettling than the real thing, but believe me, it is.

Here was a kind of horror show of humankind. Ron Mueck’s A Girl (2006) is perhaps the perfect example. A massive baby, still with the umbilical cord attached, flecked with blood and realistic whispers of hair on her head. We’ve all seen new born babies before, so that’s not new, but to see one scaled up to perhaps 10-times real life size is a startling experience. One couldn’t help going back for another look. It’s the stuff of Chucky-type nightmares.

A topless torso of a man explodes through the floor: Zharko Basheski’s Ordinary Man (2009-2010). Unshaven and looking towards the ceiling, he might be climbing out of a swimming pool, such is the pose. On the other hand, he may be trying to climb out of an abyss with a brief glance towards the heavens, hoping to catch the eye of his maker.

Corner after corner, there is an assault on the senses and, mostly, a recoil at what comes next. I watched a couple looking at Duane Hanson’s Salesman (1992), a mannequin dressed in a business suit. When they moved away, I was fully expecting it to follow them. 

Nakedness is a recurring theme. In itself, this seems an unlikely problem for an exhibition, but these were replicas of people laying bare not only their bodies, but also their souls. We were staring into their lives, and they let us in. It didn’t matter that they were inanimate; to the viewer, they were pretty much real, and it would only take one of them to breathe or to wink back at us and we would have been completely freaked out.

New Yorker, self-proclaimed “It-Girl with a penis” Juliana Huxtable, was, perhaps a welcome relief. Immortalised into sculpture by Frank Benson using 3D scanning tech – Juliana (2014-2015) – this was a transformation of a real transgender woman into a representation of a crazy, sexy, cyborg. A reminder that neither gender, identity nor sexuality are binary, and a rather magnificent, powerful statement of courage and liberation.

Nearby, Mel Ramos’ Chiquita Banana (2007) was a kind of tropical paradise: a topless woman, a cool car and fairly typical sexual symbolism. Even so, the soft porn, air-brushed, realism of the piece un-nerves, and makes you wonder whether this is really okay to be standing in front of, as a spectator with a camera.

That is presumably the point of Gosh! Is It Alive?. It challenges. None of the subject matter should be a problem. Naked babies, naked people, clothed people, trans people. Why does any of this cause an issue?

There are moral concerns about cloning humans, there are worries about robots taking over where humans once were, and then there is a general uncertainty about what this world will look like in the future – even in one year’s time. Now that artists can make facsimiles of us look so real, just imagine what will happen when the scientists and engineers get on the case.

Pete Goodbody

See Gosh! Is It Alive? at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, until 6 August 2017 — adults DKK 115, students DKK 95

Opening hours Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5pm, Wednesday 10am–9pm, Monday closed

#arkengosh

Images, from top: Installation shot of Mel Ramos’ Chiquita Banana (2007), Zharko Basheski’s Ordinary Man (2009-2010), and Frank Benson’s Juliana (2014-2015). All artworks part of Gosh! Is It Alive?. Images by photographer Pete Goodbody, 2017, and courtesy the artists

Bob Dickinson takes a detailed tour of Bosnia Herzegovina’s capital and largest city: taking in a Biennial hosted in a bunker, its tunnels and old cinemas, its best bars, and even its 1984 Winter Olympics site…

This summer, while thousands of visitors flock to Venice for the 57^th Biennale, a trickle of tourists finds the way to a tiny town in central Bosnia, where they hope to see that country’s own Biennial of Contemporary Art. Back in 2011, I travelled to Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH for short) to witness the opening of the very first of these Biennials. And this year I made my way back there, to the fourth, which will be the final one. The town, Konjic, is about an hour’s drive from Sarajevo, the country’s capital. And the art can only be seen by appointment at the local tourist office. It’s worth going to the trouble of doing all this, though, because the Biennial takes place inside an enormous concrete bunker, built by the former communist regime inside a mountain, and kept strictly secret until its discovery after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

While Konjic is a sleepy, provincial town, Sarajevo is an international city. There’s plenty of choice about where to stay, from cheap B&Bs to modern, shiny hotels. My favourite area to be based is Baskarsija, or the Old Town, where a network of narrow streets full of little shops and cafes surrounds sedate Ottoman buildings like the Clock Tower (which keeps lunar time), the Bey’s Mosque, built in the early 16^th century, and the old Silk Bazaar, the Brusa Bezistan. A short walk towards the river brings you to the Latin Bridge, where the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated along with his wife, one afternoon in 1914, sparking off World War One. Whichever way you look, Sarajevo presents itself as a focal point where civilizations and religions have met and overlapped: the Islamic world of the Ottoman Turks, the Imperial and Roman Catholic world of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and later on, the modernist and communist world of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

A couple of hundred yards along Obala Kulina bana, the street that runs beside the River Miljaka, in an old Austro Hungarian apartment block, is Sarajevo’s only independent contemporary art gallery, Duplex 100m2, founded by a Frenchman, Pierre Courtin, and named after the size of the apartment in square metres. Over the last few years, Courtin has discovered and curated shows by many of  the region’s current leading artists, many of whom are now internationally-known, including Selja Kamaric, Adela Jusic, Selma Selman (pictured, top), and Dante Buu, whose current show was on when I visited. But Courtin is still struggling to pay the rent. There is no government support for contemporary art, so local museums including the National Gallery have all struggled to keep going. Artists, meanwhile, frequently have to live abroad to find enough work. On the afternoon of my recent visit, Pierre was chatting to Enes Zulsevic, a young artist from Mostar. He makes graphic animations and collages. One striking work brings together all the graffiti he could find in his home town in one image that Pierre was talking to him about installing across one wall at Duplex. Another work, an animation you can see on his website, plays with the image of a mirror and an old photo of his father, a Moslem soldier who died in the siege of Mostar.

Trapped in a loop from Enes Žuljević on Vimeo.

At the National Gallery, a big exhibition of photographs by Milomir Kovacevic Strasni documented the other siege – that of Sarajevo itself, taking place between 1992 and 1995, in which approximately 11,500 people died. Evidence of that siege, in terms of bullet holes and what are called “Sarajevo roses”, blast damage to the pavements caused by RPGs, subsequently filled with red wax to mark the deaths of civilians, are also hard to ignore. While many of Sarajevo’s oldest landmarks survived the siege unscathed, including the old Sephardic Synagogue that now houses the city’s Jewish Museum, others, like Vijecnica, the City Hall, did not: location of Bosnia’s National Library, it was targeted by Serb artillery in 1992 and over a million books burned, showering the city with tiny fragments of text. The building, an eccentric piece of Austro-Hungarian architecture in a kind of Moorish style, was slowly restored, and re-opened in 2014. I walked past it again during my recent visit; it was getting dark, the afternoon sunshine had given way to rain, but the building was decorated with red carpets and lit up for what looked like a Hollywood party, and hundreds of well-dressed young people were milling around having their photos taken. It was the city’s prom season, which proved so popular the police had closed the road off.

I had a different location in mind, however. That night I had gone in search of sevdah, the gypsy-inspired music that is beginning to be rediscovered and marketed as the “Balkan blues”, by musicians like Davir Imamovic. In the Old Town, a museum called the Sevdah Art House has its own  courtyard cafe, where you can hear historic recordings of sevdahlinka from the early 20th century. Drinking coffee in Bosnia, by the way, is an important social ritual; it’s served strong, in tiny cups, and consumed with a lot of sugar, accompanied by conversation, and frequently a cigarette or two. I had been told that in this courtyard a local sevdah singer performs live every Saturday night. But on the Saturday I was there, a desultory waiter told me: “He’s gone to the Hotel Saraj.” So, after getting directions from the policemen at the road block, this was where I was heading, uphill, along a steep and winding road.

The Hotel Saraj, overlooking a dramatic view of the whole city, proved to be enormous. There were two ballrooms, with live music blasting from both. Folk tunes  were being sung for Slovenian tourists in one, and, a couple of drinks later, I was joining in with the dancing, not knowing the steps, let alone the words of the songs. Upstairs, a wedding party was jumping up and down to live turbofolk — a far faster and more frenetic musical cocktail. But, that night, there was no Sevdah. Nonetheless, live music abounds in Sarajevo.

The trip to Konjic took up an entire day. Public transport in Bosnia mainly takes the form of buses connecting all the major towns. There are trains, but the railway system, starved of investment, hasn’t recovered from the conflicts of the 1990s. The Tourist Office sits beside the town’s famous bridge, which gracefully spans the River Neretva. Originally built by the Turks in the 17^th century, it was blown up by German forces in 1945, and restored by the Turkish Government in 2009. Here, a van picks you up and takes you along the river to the Tito Bunker, which, from the outside, resembles a row of whitewashed houses, with shuttered windows. This is a deliberate disguise. Walking through the front door, you enter a series of increasingly wide corridors, taking you into a complex that would have accommodated 350 people including President Tito and his wife, and their top military leadership, in the event of a nuclear war. And the main threat to Yugoslavia, in the 1950s and 60s, came not from Western Europe or the USA, but from the Soviet Union, from which Tito had parted ways in the late 1940s.

In 2011, the Tito Bunker, or D-0 ARK, as it’s properly known, was still in the hands of the Bosnian Army, and at that time we had to go through a military checkpoint before we saw any contemporary art. Now, however, the Bunker is run by the municipal government, which seems to want to ration the amount of time anyone can stay in there. We had one hour, and were subject to a very stringent guided tour, led by a young woman who rushed us through countless rooms containing surveillance equipment, accommodation spaces (including Tito’s own bedroom), generators, fuel stores, and art. A lot of art, in fact, because all the art from the previous three biennials has remained in situ, the aim of the Biennial organisers having been to create a permanent collection of contemporary art within a unique Cold War museum.

It seems, however, that the local authorities do not care so much about the art. Many of the video installations were not working, the tour guide telling us that they would have been operational if we had arranged in advance for them to be switched on. Having not been informed about any of this earlier, however, no such arrangement could possibly have been made. But some outstanding examples of work were still unmissable. Annalisa Cannito’s Silence is Violence (2017), for instance, is a series of installations, including bullets suspended from the ceiling, and lightboxes displaying photographs of military warning signs to “keep quiet” — the kind of thinking that ensured the preservation of not just the Tito Bunker, but also the numerous munitions stores all over Bosnia that were originally intended to provide a defence against invasion, but ended up fuelling inter-ethnic slaughter.

In what used to be the bunker’s map room, Damian Le Bas’s Roma Jugoslavija (2015), is the British-born artist’s colourful but troubling tribute to the history of Roma people in the region. And from another artist of Roma heritage, Iron Curtain/Mercedes 310 (2015), is Selma Selman’s powerful photo-installation picturing the artist hailing us from inside a van (top), with a pile of metal detritus, the sort of stuff Roma people reputedly buy and sell for a living, laid out in front of the image.

On the way back from Konjic, I took a detour at Sarajevo Airport in order to visit the Tunnel Museum (pictured, above), where you can walk through a section of the original tunnel that was excavated during the siege, in 1993, under the main runway, to provide a route connecting the city’s defenders with Bosnian army-controlled areas beyond the Serb lines. From here, a taxi was hired to return me to the city centre. Its driver turned out to have been a Bosnian soldier during the siege, and he insisted on taking me on a long journey up into the mountains overlooking the city, to show me the places where Serb forces had targeted the city. Their view over Sarajevo was clear and unimpeded. In amongst the forests that cover those mountains, the taxi driver also showed me the remnants of the concrete bobsleigh run that had been built for the 1984 Winter Olympics (pictured, below). It’s enormous, covered in graffiti, and resembles a kind of strange, stone snake.

Built for the same occasion in the city itself was a large shopping mall, the Skendarija Centre. Nowadays, it’s rather neglected, and has been damaged by heavy snowfalls in recent years. But it houses two important venues for anyone interested in contemporary art: a permanent collection of international work at Ars Aevi, which began being donated during the siege years, and the Collegium Artisticum gallery, which, when I visited, was exhibiting a group show called YEBIHA (standing for Young and Emerging BiH Artists). This included an intriguing-looking series of video performances by Mak Hubjer, Rest in Peace, War, and Clear Conscience (all 2017), and Dzenan Hadzihazanovic’s huge monochrome painting, Queue (2017). Ars Aevi is enthralling and time-consuming; work by Beuys, Abramovic and Pistoletto, among many others, is exhibited in front of the wooden crates the works will be transported in, once the collection gets its proper venue, designed by Renzo Piano, but yet to be built.

Walking distance from here, across the river and along a tree-lined avenue where many old embassy buildings are situated, is one of Sarajevo’s most popular places to get a drink and unwind: the Tito Café. Filled with Tito memorabilia and surrounded by a collection of broken-down military vehicles, the café is popular with students and bohemian-types. It’s a good place to start your evening, which, if it’s a Monday, should end up in one place only: Kino Bosna, an old, communist-era cinema that has been turned into a kind of artist-led cabaret. The drinks are cheap, the walls are covered in old posters, and onstage entertainment is provided by a band singing folk and pop songs accompanied by accordion, guitar and double bass. Later, in the traditional Bosnian manner, the band goes from table to table, performing especially for you and your friends. It helps if you know the words. But in time, after another visit, I think I may eventually start picking up the language.

Bob Dickinson

You can see the fourth Biennial of Contemporary Art in Tito’s Bunker, Konjic, near Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, until 21 October 2017