go_Home

Collaboration of Bosnian Artist Danica Daki + Croatian Artist Sandra Sterle
Nov-Dec, 2001

Project Description: In the four-month residency and online project go_HOME, Bosnian artist Danica Daki and Croatian artist Sandra Sterle will explore physical, cultural, and psychological dislocation and strategies for rebuilding and renewal. In September 2001, the artists, two women of different ethnic backgrounds from the former Yugoslavia who maintain homes and careers in both West and East Europe, will relocate to New York City to live together for four months in an experimental home. Artist Marjetica Potr_ from Slovenia and artist Milica Tomic with theorist Branimir Stojanovic from Serbia, will participate in the project in September and December respectively. The artists will utilize the physical residence and their website – a virtual home on the internet — as a haven for creating video and photographic projects, and as a common meeting ground for engaging the interested public in dialogue around issues of migration, national identity, technology, and globalization. The project will provide time and space for highly personal reflection and artmaking as well as public discussion from fresh perspectives not often heard in the United States. The go_HOME website will feature photographic, video, and sound works; recipes; a bibliography; texts from the US and from Eastern Europe; a calendar of events; chatrooms; and a guestbook. Each month, the artists will invite artists, architects, scholars, representatives from immigrant service organizations, and neighbors for Sunday dinner discussions, which will be webcast live through the new media center Location One in New York.

The themes of the dinners will interweave an exploration of the impact of the internet on culture and community with the topics: Architectures of Migration; Women Who Travel Too Much: Relocating Culture, Reproducing Home; Transitory Cases: Language, Media, and Migration; Imagined Homes: Nationalism and Globalization. The October dinner discussion will be point-to-point web-streamed with the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Arts’ media lab. In November, the dinner discussion will be point-to-point web-streamed with the new media center Mama (Mi2), in Zagreb, Croatia. These two sites will each organize a parallel, interactive dinner gathering for their evening of web-streamed dialogue with New York.

Artist Biographies:
Bosnian artist Danica Daki_ creates sculptural installations, site-specific video projections, and public architectural sound projects to investigate the corporal and global aspects of identity and language, as well as the tensions that arise between collective and individual experience. Her video installation Zid/Wall (1998) comprises 64 square images of mouths telling stories in different languages, edited into a collage recalling bricks in a wall or a patchwork of parallel individual stories. Zid/Wall highlights Daki_’s concern with the relationship between architecture, the body, and identity. In her video installation

Autoportrait (1999), two languages and stories emerge from a barely animated bust of the artist. In this image, the artist’s mouth is doubled, replacing her eyes and enabling her to tell fairytales simultaneously in Bosnian and German. As this disconcerting image obscures recognition of Daki_’s face by obliterating the artist’s eyes, it also portrays the composite of language, stories, and homes that make up her identity. Daki_’s work has been shown at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1999); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (1999); and she has created site-specific public projects in Bratislava, Slovakia, and in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was an ArtsLink Fellow in 1999. Daki_ was born in Sarajevo and studied at the Academy of Art in Sarajevo, the Academy of Art in Belgrade, and the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf. She lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany, and in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovinia.

Croatian artist Sandra Sterle creates fantastic and enigmatic personas in her practice of video, media installation, web projects, photography, and performance. Inhabiting various quasi-fictional identities, including a mad woman, a Croatian peasant, an eery Minnie Mouse, and a poet, in her CD-ROM The Characters (1998), she investigates shifts, gaps, and areas of overlap in identities and language. For Sterle, the identity of the medium itself can be multiple, as she explores how the lives of ephemeral, process-oriented works of art are affected, and in some cases eluded, by sophisticated modes of documentation. Sterle examines the tension and coexistence of traditional and contemporary ways of life, and situations in which technology and tradition inform each other as they represent human emotions and fears. Sterle collaborated with artist Dan Oki on the performance and interactive language media project, To Forget, To Remember, and to Know (1998) at Amsterdam College in The Netherlands, the school that nearly all new immigrants attend to learn Dutch. Her work has been shown at _kuc Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000); Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem (1998); Videomedeja, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (1997); and she has created site-specific public work in Nettlecombe, United Kingdom, and has designed several online projects. She was an ArtsLink Fellow in 1999. Sterle was born in Zadar, Croatia, and she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, and the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf. She teaches video art at the Art Academy in Split, Croatia, and lives there and in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Slovenian artist and architect Marjetica Potr_ has been concerned for the past half decade with the phenomenon of migration. An urban anthropologist, Potr_ investigates the shifting terrain of the contemporary city. Potr_ champions a growing trend of what she terms “individual initiatives” in urban construction that include such diverse manifestations as squatter cooperatives, shantytowns, and private gated communities. Her large-scale architectural projects grow out of her in-depth research of specific instances of migration. Potr_’s Core Units are small functional buildings designed for modification and use by settlers, and her House for Travelers (2000) can be erected as needed by migrants. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Museum’s 2000 Hugo Boss Prize, and her work has been shown most recently at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2001); Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000); and at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (1999). She was an ArtsLink Fellow in 1995. Marjetica Potrc lives and works in Ljubljana and is currently Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Ljubljana, and this year she is an artist in residence at the Kuensterlhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Serbian theorist Branimir Stojanovic and artist and actress Milica Tomic live and work together in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Stojanovic holds a graduate degree in Philosophy from Belgrade University, and has published numerous articles on contemporary philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. In her work, Tomic highlights the disjunctures between personal experience and historically and media constructed images. Tomic’s public photographic installation Erlauf Remembers (2001) sited on roadside billboards around Erlauf, Austria, continues her interest in the role of personal responsibility in constructing memory, nationality, and recording political violence. Her earlier video installation I am Milica Tomic (1998) is a personal meditation on the historical and political significance of building identity through language. Tomi_ has had solo exhibitions at the Secession, Vienna, Austria (2000); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria (1999); and she has created an online project on Cygnet Virtual Gallery for the company Shiseido (1999). Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennial (2001); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2001); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1999); the Sao Paulo Biennial (1998); and her work will be included in an upcoming exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland, in 2002.

Go_HOME is co-directed by Fritzie Brown and curator Katherine Carl.

Locations and Dates:
Go_HOME will take place in New York City and online from September 15, 2001 to December 31, 2001. Four Sunday dinner discussions with special guests will be held during the course of the project. Each dinner will be webcast at www.project-go-home.com and www.location1.org starting at 2:00 pm US Eastern Time and 8:00 pm Central European Time on the following dates:

September 23 : Architectures of Migration
October 14 : Women Who Travel Too Much: Relocating Culture, Reproducing Home
November 11 : Transitory Cases: Language, Media, and Migration
December 16 : Imagined Homes: Nationalism and Globalization

Partners:
Go_HOME is an ArtsLink Special project funded by the Animating Democracy Initiative, a program of Americans for the Arts funded by the Ford Foundation; the Trust for Mutual Understanding; the Kettering Family Foundation; CEC International Partners; and Franklin Furnace’s “The Future of the Present” program.

Location One, New York, will conduct the web streaming activities through its network of international affiliates. The Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Arts will host the point-to-point online discussion in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on October 14. The new media center Mama (Mi2), with the non-governmental organization What, How, and For Whom, will host the point-to-point online discussion in Zagreb, Croatia, on November 11.

IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Press Contact: Fritzie Brown: 212.643.1985 x23
Katherine Carl: 718.398.0107