27 Dec FT000, 2019

FT000, video still

FT000, video still

FT000, video still

FT000, video still

FT000, video still

FT000, Installation View, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2019

FT000, Installation View, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2019

FT000, Installation View, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2019

Two-channel video installation, 3’ 43”
(with the archive film footage – digitalized 8mm film reels bearing the register numbers FT001, FT021, FT048, and FT051 from the collection of Veda Zagorac and Zdravko Pečar; the work was realized in the framework of Unprotected Witness No. 1: Afrodisiac exhibition, commissioned by the Museum of African Art in Belgrade)

The work questions (self)representational politics of the Museum of African Art founded in 1977 in Belgrade, then the capital of socialist Yugoslavia and one of the leading actors in the Non-aligned movement. It problematize the colonial gaze in the collection displayed in a country with no colonial experience, and politics of representation of artifacts both gathered and offered for pleasure and valorization to the white Europeans.  It looks for the holes and the invisible although not intentionally hidden in the Museum’s permanent display: for the white traveler in Africa and his/ hers deeply rooted phantasmas about this continent. By researching, analyzing and deconstructing private films belonging to the Museum’s founders, well respected Yugoslav diplomats, revolutionaries, journalists and activists Veda Zagorac and Zdravko Pečar, the work is created as a search for a missing Museum’s exhibit, the nonexistent film reel FT000 which shows the founders as the representative tourists and collectors of “Africa”, rather than representatives of specific political ideas or ideology while on service in Africa.