Goran Djordjević @ Pykë-Presje

The exhibition presents lesser known films and visual materials of Goran Djordjević, an internationally recognized conceptual artist. Djordjević, who studied electrical engineering in Belgrade and the Visual Studies in MIT, used the heuristic models of science to engage with the complex visual forms. By presenting his work within art context  as visual explorations, Djordjević challenged the traditional notion of artist as individual genius and defended the primacy of research over creativity. In his first exhibition in Prizren, his birth town, Visual Explorations will present Djordjević’s works produced in this vein.

The exhibition is composed of three parts. The first part includes a series of graphic works from his ‘Processes in a Square System’, which is defined as “a set of visual phenomena within the square system determining the state of the system.” Originally exhibited at Paris Biennale in 1975 and published in a comics journal Pegaz the same year, the work is one of the most rigid examples of the visual explorations. 

Using this same logic, Djordjević, throughout the seventies produced a series of short experimental films, using the 8 mm film camera as a tool for analyzing the material and structural aspects of his environment. ‘The Open Book’, ‘Belgrade’, ‘The Blue Sky’, ‘Tape Recorder’, ‘Family Photos’, ‘Self Portrait’, and ‘Art is Illusion’ were all made in the mid-seventies, and testify to the ethos of the experimental film blurring the lines between the source and the representation. The audience will have a chance to see these films, which were last publicly screened at the London Film-makers Cooperative in 1979. 

Alongside this, the exhibition will display Djordjević’s cinematic portraits of artists, each lasting for 15 seconds, taking part in contemporary art manifestations in Belgrade, Paris and Venice, between 1974 to 1980. This 30 minutes-long film project, showing over hundred contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys, Genesis P. Orridge and Marina Abramović, will be publicly shown for the first time in the Visual Explorations exhibition at Pykë-Presje Gallery. These portraits are not only a document of the most lively period of Conceptual Art, but they are also a look at the artworld as a “structure” itself.