The exhibition of Zoran Naskovski is realised as part of the international residency programme entitled Platforms for Desire: The Urban Scene and Its Discontents in the project room. Naskovski is invited to spend a month (April) in Budapest and create a new piece here that we will show in the project room.
Zoran Naskovski (1960) has been a member of the Belgrade art scene since the second half of the 1980s with conceptually informed and very often provocative works. His video-installation L’origine du monde was shown in the After the Wall show in the Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art in the summer of 2000. This piece was made after the famous painting of Courbet (L’origine du monde) and confronts the viewer with his/her own voyeuristic gaze.
In the first part of the exhibition period, Naskovski shows his work Death in Dallas in which he examines the arrival of world news into the realm of popular-folk culture. In the former Yugoslavia, one of the most important ‘institutions’ in the dissemination of news was the ‘bard’, wondering around the country and playing the lute. These ‘pilgrims’ interpret the international news, by singing and playing their instruments, to local audiences with immense popularity and they publish their recordings on LPs.
The story Naskovski has chosen recalls the events of the infamous Kennedy-assassination. In the video-installation, Naskovski juxtaposes images of J. F. Kennedy’s official appearances, his private life and the assassination itself with the monotonous chanting of the bard which is a free adaptation of the story of the American president. There is an interesting discrepancy between the black and white documentary imagery and the artificially inserted commentary in English.
During his one-month residency, Zoran Naskovski produces a new piece with which he also investigates the influences of different cultures on one another and the way in which certain cultural phenomena function among new circumstances and become local versions. This new project is related to the theme Naskovski has recently been working on, namely urban street basketball culture. Naskovksi juxtaposes this ‘proletarian’ sport and its ‘heroes’ with those professional players who earn millions of dollars. In the case of Naskovski’s video, Speedy’s ‘one-million-dollar smile’ is contrasted with Michael Jordan’s one-million-dollar contract.
