Katarina Zdjelar and Michael Höpfner are both committed to provoking reflection on perceived notions of memory and collective imagination within Western culture. As a result, the artistic activities and approaches of both artists undertake a profound critical analysis of political and economic developments in contemporary society. By individually pursuing varying timelines that move between the past and the future, Höpfner and Zdjelar propose an investigation of the landscape of cultural erosion, projecting an element of doubt in regard to the idea of progress as the driving force in Western society.
Katarina Zdjelar works in socially diverse and manifold contexts. Thus, she sets up a methodology of cultural critique by means of a strategy of analysis of language and the spoken word. For the Serbian artist, language is a constant cultural hypothesis charged with contradictions and ideologies, filled with displacement and overlapping – like a chemical reagent adopted to test the mechanisms used for establishing identity, social affiliations and the manner in which historical memory is consolidated.
In A Girl, the Sun and an Airplane Airplane (2007), Zdjelar asked several citizens of the Albanian capital Tirana to speak informally in Russian inside a recording studio. The artist’s objective was to bring out, in terms of linguistic memory, what remained from the times of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, when Russian was the language of cultural and political reference in Albania. Hence, the work is an attempt of engraving in the depths of the collective unconscious, which is investigated by giving space to individual linguistic memory in relation to a specific period of the recent past. Taken as a basic instrument of communicative mediation, language is analysed in this work by Zdjelar as a material requirement, an ideological vehicle able to establish and transmit a specific certainty of common sense and a determined conception of the world. What is the border between past and present? To which extent is language able to become an instrument of the recording of memory and of political and social change? For those citizens of Tirana who were involved in the artist’s work, the act of speaking Russian became a means to precipitate various layers of memory. The older ones remembered a large variety of words and sentences, even if these were often used inarticulately and incoherently, while the younger participants struggled in vain to find access to a form of linguistic and cultural memory which on one side still appears obscurely present, but on the other seems today to be inaccessible through its specific codes. In this way, Zdjelar demonstrates her sense of the ambiguous and vague ties that articulate the relationships between language, memory and identity. This decreasing and nearly forgottenknowledge of Russian is more than merely symbolic, presenting a material and concrete image of forgetting within the Albanian collective memory. As if working with a form of cultural removal between two distinct moments, the artist anthropologically confronts the present with the past, also investigating the linguistic relationship between memory and forgetting. The result is an intermediary space between two moments in time, a means to spotlight the critical and liberating potential of historical knowledge. A Girl, the Sun and an Airplane Airplane confronts the contemporary dimensions of a democratic Albania with the fragmented memory of the recent past of the country and allows them to clash, opening a reflection on the subject of historical responsibility by investigating the relations between reality and historical fact and also their assimilation on a private and individual level.
Everything is Gonna Be (2008) provides a further consolidation of the artist's philosophical analysis of the relationship between language as a basic means of communication and as a cultural manifestation of collective identity. This video work was realized in Norway, involving a group of middle-aged people who were brought up in the comfort of the Norwegian welfare system, which was established in the 1960s, hand in hand with the country’s economic and industrial development. The group consisted of an amateur choir made up of a group of friends who, according to the demands of the artist, performed the famous song “Revolution” by The Beatles as a dialogue in two parts, focusing on the events of 1968 and the unresolved relationship between revolution and violence, between the desire for social change and political extremism. Zdjelar focuses here on images of the expressive interpretation of the participants by underlining the singularity of their faces and emotions, as well as on the technical difficulties that emerged during the vocal performance. Within the artist’s work, the fluid but imperfect use of the English language by the singers becomes a symbolic representation of the participants’ insufficiency in regard to the song’s actual content. It provides what is almost a demonstration of the uneasiness and confusion generated by the distance between the singers’ own youthful ambitions and the reality of their lives. The work oscillates between form and content, between the actual musical performance and the relevance of its meaning for the Norwegian singers. Presented directly and without mediation on the part of the artist, Everything is Gonna Be simultaneously raises numerous questions about the relationship between social democracy and civil commitment, challenging our notions of political activism and social compromise and combining them into one dense subject matter. What is the outcome of forty years of practice regarding social commitment in Europe? Where are the real spaces of dissent and political participation of European citizens in the global context? Everything is Gonna Be in this way opens a complex reflection on the political idea of contemporary Europe and the potential of its civil and cultural role within the contemporary world. Testifying to the relations between historical memory and individual conscience through language, the artist once again moves in her work towards a space of essential uneasiness and instability. In doing so, she emphasizes what becomes displaced and abandoned between present and past, between language as technical mode of communication and its symbolical counterpart as the cultural sedimentation of identity.
Erosion, identity, memory and dispersion are also the key words within the artistic research of Michael Höpfner. In recent years, the Austrian artist has focused his artistic activity on the practice of geographic and cultural errancy, realized by hiking through peripheral regions and deserted landscapes in different continents. ´Within the structure of cultural analysis undertaken according to a logic of field studies, the artistic practice of Höpfner moves to a field on the border between utopia and failure, between individual freedom and cultural dissolution.
For his work An Outpost of Progress (2009), Höpfner spent eight weeks walking on the high plateau Chang Tang in West Tibet, a region inhabited by approximately fifty thousand people who still live according to ancient nomadic tradition. As a territory in which tourists and foreign nationals are not permitted to walk freely, and being among the least-known regions in the world, Chang Tang was revealed during the artist's exploration to be a location for organized labour camps, fortresses of territorial conquest, motorways and places of environmental and architectural devastation of various types. Far from any natural idyll or ideal of environmental purity, the Tibetan region documented by Höpfner appears as an outpost of the global decay caused by industrialized culture – the stage for the destruction of deeply rooted culture and traditions which are thousands of years old. Between places of refuge, grottos and huts, the inhabitants of Chang Tang resist the advance of global modernity by defending their own cultural world, which is in dissolution, through the means and ways of nomadic invisibility. Presented as an installation composed of photographic registers, slides and essential residence modules derived from the ephemeral architecture of the region, Outpost of Progress is the result of the Austrian artist’s radical view of the present day and the space of our imagination. The work denies the idealization of harmony and homogeneity associated with natural areas, by showing the brutality of the antagonism between the settled and the nomadic way of life as well as between tradition and development. On a higher level of interpretative complexity, the codes of Höpfner's research oppose the colonial exoticism inherent to Western society. He confronts this with an analysis conducted according to a different kind of temporality, in this case erratic walking. For this reason, the title chosen by Höpfner, Outpost of Progress, is borrowed from a text of the same name by Joseph Conrad from 1897. The biography of this English writer of Polish origin is a paradigmatic example of the Twentieth Century's cosmopolitanism and the conflicting formation of a subjectivity that is culturally dispersed between Europe and the Afro-Asian world. In this sense, Höpfner’s work turns into a translation between different cultures and worlds, something like the staging of the performative unease achieved by the act of walking, which amplifies the profoundness of the point of view and extends the critical consciousness of perception. Which models and which cultures are able to mediate knowledge of what is different to Western culture? What remains of the ideological schism of the Twentieth Century between the European and primitive world-views? The solitary practice of Höpfner attempts to answer such questions by assuming the nature of an exercise of revolt, able to call into question the rhetoric of collective participation as a culturally and politically efficient form. Breaking the illusions and mystifications of the Western imagination,Outpost of Progress in the final analysis documents a physical and mental space of resistance against global capitalism by experimenting within the rhythm of footsteps, a thesis of a different form of freedom.