Film Portraits
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- Film Portraits
- 1974-80
- video, color, no sound
- 22min, 47sec
Goran Đorđević’s “Film Portraits” are important documents of the Serbian art intelligentsia in the context of 1970s Yugoslavia as well as the international art scene. The activities of the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade provided opportunities to address universal questions concerning that era’s conceptual art practices, which could be discussed with an international audience of guests and colleagues. The activities portrayed here range from the April Meetings in 1974 to the exhibition “October ’75” and on to encounters at the Venice Biennale in 1980. All of the “Film Portraits” show close-ups of the respective individuals, who either pose for the camera, talk into it, or smoke a cigarette. Among the enormous number of people portrayed, one encounters protagonists of the Yugoslav scene – including Braco Dimitrijević, Marina Abramović, Neša Paripović, Raša Todosijević, Sanja Iveković, and Mladen Stilinović – who entered into dialogue with figures such as Natalia LL, Joseph Beuys, Francesco Clemente, Katharina Sieverding, and Ulrike Rosenbach. Đorđević’s portraits here are thus manifestations of how Yugoslavia’s “Third Way” enabled artists and curators to foster critical discourse and international dialogue grounded in their own institutional structures. W.S.