2009 The Apartment / Stan

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Photographs taken by the visitors in the Apartment

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THE APARTMENT

August/September 2009

Commisioned for the exhibition NONPLACES, curated by Dušica Dražić and Una Popović

http://belgradenonplaces09.wordpress.com/

Organization and production: Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

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Location: One of many newly erected buildings in BelgradeThe starting point for the work APPARTMENT is dealing with the private space. For this purpose a space of a private apartment is used. It can be found in one of the numerous new buildings in Belgrade. It is an apartment so new that it has never been inhabited before, in a street as yet without a name. Still, it represents a very real destination for the audience which is invited to visit it. The audience thus became an inseparable part of the work. It doesn’t witness something that is beyond themselves, but meets an offered situation that becomes a platform for a sensation.In the beginning one receives a notebook containing instructions, an address and the keys to the apartment. Once one got there, one would find an empty apartment with the exception of a pillow, the sound-recorder, a photo-camera, and a text by Walter J. Ong “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction”. The stay of the visitors is not documented – the trace on the sojourn is left solely by the visitor himself. After the stay, the visitor is asked to pass the notebook and the keys to the next visitor of his own choice, who will pass it to someone else, and so on. This procedure is repeated daily in the course of one month, however I have no control over it. The one who has the keys has the power to do as one wishes to.What all the visitors share is the space and the possibility to communicate their experience by writing in the notebook, taking photographs and sound recording the apartment. The space is constituted by a relation of the visitors towards it; it simultaneously becomes private and public by being visited by singular people who will never have utilitarian relation to it, but people who can only „inscribe“ themselves in that space. 

In the APARTMENT situation the function of the works was subsumed by the dichotomy audience-space. Thus the space is being prepared for the audience, just as the audience comes for the space only. In its essence, the work is dealing with the communicational possibility among the audience and space, as well as among audience and audience, about where and when and how does someone particular connect to a particular environment and how does that produce a situation in space.