Golden FLOWER

The generic name of Golden Flower sculpture is Catharsis (Greek katharsis phil. purification of the soul and bringing it above all the bodily, sensory and sensual passions and impurities), and it incredibly reminds of a toilet brush, easily recognisable since you can usually see it in every bathroom.

The idea of putting up the sculpture in Bezanijska Kosa borrough was to once again emphasise the importance of Urban District, which I have been creating in that place for years as a unique oasis of art and culture, bearing in mind their very bad social status. Since Bezanijska Kosa borrough is on a hill one can see a huge part of town from, Urban District should, as I see it, play the role of a cultural lighthouse.

The brush-like flower, the symbol of spiritual cleansing, was put up on the last day of Marina Abramovic’s exibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade called “The Cleaner“, so that act was meant to be the beginning of “The Cleansing“.

The same morning, I put up a hundred of small-sized replicas sticking out of discarded paving blocks in different parts of town as direction signposts for the cultural happening in my Urban District. Art speaks in its universal language, it just has to be given a chance to be heard, and for that, what you need is a cleansed soul.

idea

How to flush out the unwanted shit stuck in your toilet and refresh your space with nice smells from flourishing flowers? The flushing/flourishing project revolves around series of installations and direct artistic engagement that uses one ambiguous object – a golden toilet brush also resembling a flower, to counterpoise directly the dominant trends in transformations of urban spaces and built environments.

Aim of this project revolves around redefining the possibilities of artistic interventions, inserting them into public spaces and above all, deploying the ambiguity of the brush/flower. Flushing/flourishing thus exhausts one object as a primary tool of artistic intervention. Namely, reversed toilet brush symbolizes the series of required and assumed inversions from the perspective of the artist, with a sculpture that has at least a double meaning. On the one side, it exhausts its formal ambiguity by presenting an inversed, giant toilet brush stuck into the ground, marking a need to encounter the current realities of urban spaces. On the other, sculpture simultaneously resembles a golden flower, thus marking potentially positive interventions that would eventually lead to novel paths in urban development.

Exhibition itself embarks onto presenting quite recent series of installing these toilet brush/flowers throughout the Belgrade (Serbia) with replicas of these structures and accompanying audio-visual materials. While putting forward an antagonistic moment, this presentation outlines the direct artistic engagement in reshaping of urban spaces its particular aim is to encourage novel trajectories, presenting the brush/flower sculpture in various spaces. Thus, exhibition first explores a 10 meters tall structure is located in a hilly suburb of Bežanijska kosa. Sculpture itself is situated here to directly oppose the centrally located Kalemegdan fortress and the Victor monument. Along with this installation, around 100 miniature brushes/flowers were also produced and simply placed on recently refurbished locations over night.

context

Recent times have seen an apparent rush in refurbishing of the Belgrade’s old core and general inclination towards becoming a global city which in effect left marks on urban development and very treatment of issues, such as urban coexistence, social justice and the city landscape itself. Alike many Eastern European capital cities that felt serious turnovers with the abolition of socialist regimes, Belgrade as well has seen a transformation into a market-led model. Effects of these changes have drastically altered the conception of urban politics, particularly by redistributing roles between the politicians, economic actors and citizens themselves. In a way, they have put forward a fast-paced model of so-called „investors’ urbanism“, while simultaneously adopting a general political view of the „capital-friendly“ city.

These changes introduced a rapid refurbishment of many derelict urban zones, in order to attract more tourists and to provide an aesthetic setting for new entrepreneurial elites. Many of these recent refurbishments in Belgrade, however, were done hastily and with apparent corruptive background, thus sparking a bundle of controversies in the public. Whereas the city authorities have been presenting these renovations of historic buildings, urban infrastructure and a construction tide as a coming of „golden age“, citizenry has been mostly ridiculing these projects, seeing them only as a cheap copies of architectural and urbanist solutions from the West. Albeit the number of Belgraders would certainly agree on need to refurbish and enhance the city life in general, these speculative developments in the eyes of many on a verge where the private interests have suppressed the public ones.