ADRIJANA HISENI

DEPOSITIONS
2008.
proposal for 29th Youth Salon - Salon of the Revolution

“Deposition of power is the first step for a peaceful resolution of conflict”

I draw only when I feel furious… Or nervous. When I’m happy I don’t feel the need to express myself - then I simply live. In 1999 I left in Belgrade the door of my room fully painted and covered with everything that was important to me. No I’m leaving everything in Zagreb.
I draw only when I feel furious… Or nervous. When I’m happy I don’t feel the need to express myself - then I simply live. I was furious and sad. The woman at the police, where I had been trying to extend my permission to stay in Croatia, told me: „ Ss far as we’re concerned, you are now nothing. Kosovo is free now, why don’t you go back there? What do you want here?”

Depositions mean taking over control and redistributing powerlessness. These are not big steps but represent threats and, if not resulting in power being granted to myself, then at least they take it away from others as well. I didn’t look for the Salon, it arrived to my inbox among one of the emails circulating around.* It seemed to me utterly senseless and irrelevant. I took away everything from it. I threw snakes into one of its venues, which they call the Barrel. I made its foundations overgrow with herbs; I banned artists from approaching it and scared away the audience. I took away the keys from the management and left them unprotected. All these are processes that will, sooner or later, take place anyway,: the building will be demolished, together with artworks and people - I only accelerated the process by placing the whole artworld into a position I found myself in at the time.

On September 9, 2008 my permission to stay in Croatia will have expired.
(A.H.)

*The email was the Call for artists’ proposals, issued by the 29th Youth Salon - Salon of the Revolution. Adrijana Hiseni’s work in the exhibition consists of the proposal she had sent to the Salon, which is reproduced here as it was received, without additional explanations or information about ist author. At the meeting with the author, after she was informed that her proposal had been accepted, we found out that the letter had not come from a young artist resenting the art system, together with both the institution of the Youth Salon and the Meštrović pavillion, but a young person of foreign citizenship involved in a kafkaesque and absurd bureaucratic procedures of the Republic of Croatia, whose policy to foreigners did everything it could to disencourage and halt her intention to stay, live and work in Croatia, after finishing her studies in Zagreb. The anger towards the institution of the Youth Salon and its venue thus exceeds the safe and comfortable delienations of the artworld - moreover, the world of art and its “house” are here not only a symbol but an actual instance of the oppressive state power. In her proposal, Hiseni expresses a desire to demolish Meštrović’s House of Artists, one of the starting points of the Salon of the Revolution, which also pays tribute to its inception as an instance of - even if institutionalized - resistance. She not only proposes but, with language as a perfomative act, does so: “Art in your house is dead, revolution in your house is dead, the house should be torn down.” This year’s edition of the Youth Salon - Salon of the Revolution, which questions possibilities of art as a tool for critical articulation of reality, as well as for generating shifts and transformations within this reality, opens on October 4, 2008 in Zagreb. Adrijana Hiseni will leave Croatia on September 9, 2008 because foreigner quotas defined by the laws of the Republic of Croatia, envision and desire the citizens of the Republic of Kosovo only as low-wage workers in jobs that are undesirable and imply a low level of education. Highly educated Kosovo citizens, such as Adrijana Hiseni, in the already great competition on the market, are not welcome. The work by Adrijana Hiseni (the reproduction of her proposal to the Youth Salon) will not be presented as a static object in the exhibition but as a flyer handed out to each visitor at the entrance. In this was it becomes an alternative guide through the exhibition, or a guide for the exhibition that doesn’t or shouldn’t exist, in the “house” where, like on numerous occasions beofore, state politics, ideology and art meet in the most representative way. After its turbulent history, now this meeting is enacted on the level of a micro-narrative, a micro-history which, in contrast to numerous similar stories happening on a daily basis, will at least escape utter oblivion. (I.B. & A.M.)
ADRIJANA HISENI was born in 1983 in Belgrade, Srbia, where she lived until 1999 when she moved to Prishtina, Kosovo. After going away to study at the Faculty of Economy in Zagreb, the story begins…