From June 24 to October 3, 2021, MONTAЖ$TROJ is participating in the exhibition “SPOZNANJE! UPOR! REAKCIJA!” (“REALIZE! RESIST! REACT!”) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana. The exhibition is curated by Bojana Piškur, with guest curators Linda Gusia, Jasna Jakšić, Vida Knežević, Nita Luci, Asja Mandić, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Ivana Vaseva, Rok Vevar and Jasmina Založnik.
Regarding performance as an exercise of political will, this retrospective exhibition focuses on political performances in the territory of the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s – a decade marked by war, nationalism, revisionism, corruption and the transition from socialism to capitalism; a decade that left an indelible mark on the entire territory of the former state. In that period, political performances became an expression of resistance to various radical policies and aggressive processes of transforming society but also a means of reflecting on new ideas and directions of development for the newly created states in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
The exhibition “SPOZNANJE! UPOR! REAKCIJA!” comprises over 120 works of art, archival materials and video documents from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro and Northern Macedonia. MONTAЖ$TROJ is presented through the documentation of its early works: THE FOOTBALL BOOT IN THE ART GALLERY, ACHTUNG ALARM! and RAP OPERA 101.
THE FOOTBALL BOOT IN THE ART GALLERY, MONTAЖ$TROJ’s first public appearance, was performed as an homage to Kazimir Malevich’s painting “Sportsmen”. The action took place on the then Day of the Yugoslav People’s Army (December 22, 1989) and was performed by 11 young men without any stage experience dressed in costumes inspired by the painting. The proclamation of the “Theatralization of Football Culture” became reality in football fan incidents that took place on May 13, 1990, at the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, when violence, initially political, spilled over into the national domain – many of those who witnessed the events of that day speak of football violence transforming into a tool in the hands of nationalist currents in the then Yugoslavia; foreshadowing the days when automatic rifles would replace torn chairs in the hands of those same young men.
Institutionally and non-institutionally, the atmosphere in the public space was brought to a climax, which was illustrated by the first street action of the performance group MONTAЖ$TROJ – ACHTUNG ALARM! from September 1990. Announcing their first full-length performance FIRE-TECHNICS, the group members drove through the center of Zagreb in a fire engine, sporting a futurist-avant-garde combination of costume and makeup, urging citizens to be alert and cautious. The sound of the siren and warnings spoken through a megaphone simultaneously served as a reflection of the playfulness of the decadent 1980s and a prelude to the tragic chaos of the 1990s.
RAP OPERA 101 (1991) combined the aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde, Greek tragedy, rap music, and the AK-47 automatic rifle – whose time in the region was soon to come – with the aesthetics of music videos. The topicality of the moment in which the rifle became a victorious weapon, and which visually rests on the engaged and agitating, by no means pacifist poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” by El Lissitzky, does not demand additional political explication. The theater of football, perhaps even “of weapons,” confirmed itself in the act of shooting the ball into the auditorium as an element of reality accompanied by a monologue calling to battle, to arms.
