19:30

Aleksandra Domanovic

7 Jan — 6 Feb 2014

Taking its title from the time slot of the evening television news programs in former Yugoslavia, Domanović’s project ‘19:30’ is an anthology of the newscasts’ titles and theme tunes and an emerging collection of their commissioned remixes, edits, and new versions. The work began in 2010 when Domanović traveled around the former republics of Yugoslavia, visiting the television networks and national archives of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia. She invited the collaboration of techno DJs, who used the collected material as samples to mix with their music.

For the project, musical themes from the first televised Yugoslavian news broadcast in 1958 up to the present were taken from national state-owned television stations. As institutions, these public stations are of particular cultural and national importance and have managed to sustain their presence in the collective consciousness, even after the arrival of private television following the fall of the socialist regime. This is in part a result of the political situation and economic recession of the late 1980s, culminating in war in 1991, which led to a surge of interest in evening television news. Watching the evening news became a part of the daily routine, a must that determined the rhythm of life. The coded nature of the daily repeated music themes became deeply embedded in the national memory and part of the collective memory of several generations of viewers.
The project juxtaposes the musical, historical, and psychological values of two different collective experiences: watching the evening news, which drew masses of people of all nationalities in former Yugoslavia in front of their... [lire plus]

Commissaire de l'exposition / Curator : Etienne Bernard