Adrijana Gvozdenović (Montenegro/Belgium) is an artist interested in artists’ motivation and ways of resisting (self)institutionalized structures. Her work often develops through collaborations with other artists and researchers. With her research project “Archiving Artistic Anxieties,” Adrijana has been an associate researcher at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels) and Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The project explored formats of publicness as research methods, resulting in publications, workshops, and performances. Some of them are presented and performed within the “FairShare: self-publishing as an artistic practice” (CIAP Hasselt 2019), “The Hub – Between the iliac crest & the pubic bone” (GMK Zagreb 2019), and “victories over the suns” (Brussels, 2019). More recently her work was presented within the exhibition “This situation has developed over a long time” (ŠKUC gallery, Ljubljana 2021), she co-curated a block “Not in the mood” for the postgraduate program of a.pass Brussels (2021) and collaborated with artist Goda Palekaitė for their research project “Anthropomorphic trouble” (commissioned by Art Catalyst Sheffield and presented at Whitechapel Gallery, London 2021).

 

A Report on the Subject: We Are Following Your Great Example

A text-based work, co-written with Kristina Gvozdenović
Working with letters, documents, and writings in relation to the anti-fascist movement of women (AFŽ) from the archive of the Historical Museum of Montenegro.

2017-2018

Work was created as an intervention for the exhibition Drugarice – Women’s Movement in Montenegro 1943-1953, National Museum of Montenegro, Cetinje, 2017.
In 2018, adapted and published for the book “Strange Attractors,” X Berlin Biennial (pages 14-24): a curatorial publication project by Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, “which unites artist contributions and archival material. It is an exercise in uncertainty and a search for analogue strategies of opacity.”
“Sisters Adrijana and Kristina Gvozdenović have written a letter that adopts the language used among women comrades in order to imagine a past that describes the spirit present in time. The letter was written using textual material available in the archive of the Historical Museum of Montenegro, and Adrijana and Kristina open it with the high spirits of political ideals centered in solidarity, stating “Women, let’s take our places!”, and then slowly devolve into disillusionment with the individualistic solitude of neoliberal capitalist contemporary culture. The letter comments on how ruling ideological power is established through the symbolic perception of language, and how it manages to hide and camouflage itself (including through a lack of translation) in the service of maintaining power.” – Nomaduma Rosa Masilela in “Strange Attractors” (pages 141-148)

 

Water Made to Move

In collaboration with Vijai Patchineelam, video 16:40 min, and analogue photographs
Filmed on the location of Solana Ulcinj, Montenegro, between 2020-2021
Commissioned by SCHUNK Museum, on invitation by Joep Vossebeld, for the exhibition “In Search of Sharawadgi,” 2021

At the end of 2020, artists Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Adrijana Gvozdenovic visited the Ulcinj area, at the invitation of SCHUNK. They documented the area through film and analogue photographs. Their photo series shows how the current state of both nature and landscape is inextricably linked to the political and economic changes in the region.

Excerpt from the textual part of the video:
“Solana Ulcinj has operated successfully for almost a century, as an artificial, human-made ecosystem.
That means that the system was efficiently managed for the public good.
Water that was made to move.
The interest to make water move might be motivated by the different understandings of Nature:

as a wild place that humans should cultivate
(drying the swamp)

as a place of resources managed by humans
(salt production)

as a place that only appears as a wild place
to be branded as Wild Beauty,
so that it can be capitalized for private investment
or as a resort for the foreign tourists,
who understand nature as a place where you can
get all the comfort for aesthetic and spiritual inspiration.
(started with the process of privatization,
continues till today)

These understandings are all marked by disconnection,
as it shows we didn’t learn from all the different Natures
how to relate to the world around us
or to one another.”