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| A Simple Truth |
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EXHIBITION
Visitor When the Serbian artist Ivan Grubanov began his residency at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam in 2002, this coincided with the start of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague against his former president, Slobodan Milosevic. For two years he visited the Tribunal regularly. Confronted with the man and the events which had shaped his life, he looked for a way to capture the intensity of this experience. He started to make drawings, in an attempt to relate to this chapter in history. Again and again, from the same angle Grubanov draws the man who dominated his life, although he had never met him before. Gradually he developed a sensitivity for Milosovic’s slightest gestures. The intimacy of the drawings is insidious...
Zasto Ne Govorim Srpski (Na srpskom) “A few years ago I was in Prishtina with a friend from Croatia, miming at the guy behind the counter for beer. In the end my friend came out and asked ‘Imate li pivo, molim?’ There was a very complex reaction from the elderly shop assistant. He said, in Serbian, that he hadn’t spoken Serbian for such a long time. My friend from Croatia corrected him – she was from Croatia, and was actually speaking Croatian. And if his face fell a little, I don’t know. Someone else came in the shop, we made our purchase and left.” Phil Collins often works in socially and politically contested regions, employing elements of popular culture, low budget television and reportage style documentary, to articulate a critical fascination with the ways in which contemporary media structure lived experience. Shot in black and white 16 mm film, the film weaves unbearably intimate close-ups into a fragmented and effective panorama of Kosovo’s recent past. Contributors include politicians, intellectuals and public figures as well as ‘ordinary’ people recounting in Serbian the reasons why they no longer speak the Serbian language. They range from attempts to historicize experience to deeply personal accounts of trauma and loss.
Telethon On Memorial Day in 1973, Sammy Davis Jr. hosted a national telethon to raise funds for the Highway Safety Foundation. It wound up losing nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, thanks in no small part to Sammy Davis Jnr’s insistence on having the telethon relayed to over fifty television stations in order to ensure good exposure for himself. Even more curious was the rumoured involvement of the favoured foundation in the production of pornographic films, with filming taking place on a.o. the Highway Safety Foundation bus. But Everson’s Telethon is really about two talented acts waiting to perform in this ill-fated telethon...
Ten Men
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