STELARC IN BELGRADE

INTERNATIONAL TEST SITE Z-1 The Art Project of Dragan Ilic (New York / Belgrade):
Art and Science Lab for Extreme Experimental Activities

STELARC IN BELGRADE

Since Dragan Ilic, an artist from New York started visiting Serbia more often, he felt the need to improve and enrich Belgrade art scene. He decided to invite fellow artists he met while living in Australia and America, and present their work to Belgrade audience. Dragan Ilic’s longtime friendship with Stelarc, an internationally recognized Cypriot-born Australian artist who lives in Japan, resulted in the opportunity for Belgrade audience to see Stelarc’s presentation of his art work, get involved in discussion with him, and participate in various interactive events at the opening of the first phase of Ilic’s International Test Site Z-1 in May 2007.

Stelarc’s career started in 1970s, which were marked by significant changes in the language of art and performance. Stelarc was born in Cyprus, but due to dramatic events he immigrated to Melbourne, Australia where he made his first projects and performances.

Since the very beginnings, he showed a great interest in applying modern technologies to his art works. Consequently, his latest works present a symbiosis of body and technology. He is most famous for his “extreme” performances – live images which give an impression of his body suspensions in site specific settings around the world.

Stelarc is internationally recognized as one of the most important body-bio-performance artists. His works are represented in numerous galleries and museums around the world. Apart from his performances, Stelarc also gives lectures worldwide. He is Principal Research Fellow, Digital Research Unit, Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Nottingham Trent University. In 1997 he was appointed as an Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Law by Monash University.

On May 2nd 2007, for the first time in Belgrade art scene, a famous Australian artist Stelarc gave a presentation of his artwork. He also gave a lecture called “Alternating Anatomical Architectures: Plasticized Bodies, Partial Life, Multiplied Organs and the Extra Ear” at an international meeting called “Art, Body and Technology” held at ITS Z-1 in Ritopek near Belgrade. This extreme artist, one of the most radical in the history of contemporary art, uses human body, that is, his own body as a medium of artistic expression or as an art object. His basic idea is that “the body is obsolete” and therefore needs to be augmented or rearticulated so that it can keep up with current technological innovations as well as acceleration. Stelarc refers to his body as “the body” and uses it at bio-political space for interventions which include the usage of medical and high technology instruments as body’s prosthesis, not as a substitution or a replacement, but as an excess, addition or extension of the body. Moreover, he uses scientific and technological systems and computer interfaces to simulate and stimulate the body and produce visual images in order to generate specific, alternate, intimate and involuntary experiences. In Stelarc’s work, human body, so often presented in art works throughout the history of visual arts, is not represented through any media as a mirror reflection. He treats the body itself as an object and transforms and augments it in visual, functional and symbolical sense.

Stelarc broadens the field of art and reaches places which were considered taboo even in the most radical avant-garde art circles – these include the inside of the body, its systems of regeneration, reproduction and reprogramming of tissue.

The presentation and contextualization of Stelarc’s extraordinary art work took place at a newly opened art space/lab at the time called INTERNATIONAL TEST SITE Z-1. ITS Z-1 is a part of Dragan Ilic’s art project which functions as a kind of autonomous zone beyond official institutional structure of the local art scene, and it is constructed as such in order to support radical experiments in the field of contemporary art and science. The idea to organize the guest appearance of Stelarc and a group of about twenty international artists of similar sensibility, developed at an exhibition called “On Performance Art – Version 0”. The exhibition took place in April 2007 at Bios exhibition space in Athens and it included works by Joseph Beuys, Gunter Brus, George Macunas and John Cage, as well as the works of the artists still active today. For this exhibition, Dragan Ilic gave one of his performances with robot which produced a specific kind of drawing in interaction with audience. He also announced his next project concerning implantation of microchips into brain and body as well as work on BCI (brain-computer interface).

In a very spontaneous way and without any rigidly predetermined structure of institutionally defined event, Dragan Ilic invited a group of artists from the exhibition in Athens to come to ITS and participate in an event which would put an accent on the exchange of experiences among artists, scientists, theoreticians, and media experts. Belgrade, that is, Ritopek near Belgrade, served as a site of the artists’ struggle for a space freed from domination of already institutionalized types of art, academic models of production, market impositions, and managing approach to production of art works and projects. Apart from a large number of guests, this event hosted many local and international multimedia artists. After Stelarc’s appearance on May 2nd, the second day of this event saw the works and projects of the following artists: Katerina G, Kostas Tzimulis, Ioanna Kyrka, Kiki Psarov, Dragan Ilic, Stella Mourogianni, Marianne K, Tarin and Bob, Era Milivojevic and Snezana Arnautovic, and Noa Trister.

This event initiated the opening of INTERNATIONAL TEST SITE Z-1 which is unique for its conceptual and spatial characteristics, exclusive for its programme and is completely devoted to research and experiment in art and science.