Grey Area (2011)
A Balkan Streetscape of work by Cindy Blažević and Pascal Paquette
30 November – 4 December 2011, Gallery 1313, Toronto
9–13 October 2013, The Annual: Shifting Ground, The Gladstone Hotel, Toronto. A partial re-staging curated by Katherine Dennis
Step aside flags, anthems, invented traditions and overworked symbols of identity, you who were cultivated as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, but whose negative assertions of nationalism bore so much responsibility for the havoc of the 1990s. In this new post-war order, the shared heritage of rebuilding and the efforts to join the EU—perceived symbol of civilization, modernity and wealth—have become the new pan-Balkan identity, binding and tethering society with its own culture and insignia.
Grey Area is a site-specific installation of post-war documentary photography and painting about the shared post-war experiences, symbols and culture of the Western Balkans. The exhibition examines a less celebrated part of Europe, with its intermediate position, its historical and political complexities, and its perpetual status of limbo—a past unsympathetic to easy analysis or clear verdicts and a future wavering uncertainly between EU membership and minor nation-statehood.
The show is an epilogue to the artists' archive project, The Culture Lobby, which took place in the Western Balkans 2007-2010. The artists traveled Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, asking its citizens—and then photographing—what they thought would change in their lives when their countries joined the European Union.
Balkan streetscape comprised of paintings (Pascal), photographs (Cindy), black paper tape on gallery walls, flag, Al-Jazeera Balkans broadcast, Flag of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, cotton appliqué, sewn pre-1989, painted plaster bust of Josip Broz Tito, Former President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, by Zagreb sculptor Vanja Radauš (1906-1975), date unknown, Hej Slaveni (Hey Slavs), the national anthem of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1991, Vinyl 7" EP, recorded and pressed in Yugoslavia, 1970. Performed by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) Symphony Orchestra
