Installation: 2004

In colaboration with: Stef Heidhues, Christoph Rothmeier and Malte Urbschat

For the opening exhibition of the Galery of Visual Arts in Hamburg we invited the artists Adnan Softić, Stef Heidhues, Christoph Rothmeier and Malte Urbschat. For this occasion the artists created an installation titled "Turbo[v]folk" featuring entangled spaces, which mutually determine each other with the perspectives and insights they offer. The expression "turbofolk" refers to a music style and milieu-centred mass movement in former Yugoslavia; the music was concocted from elements of traditional folklore, eurodance and oriental music. The lyrics apply a language rich in images to tell tales of hedonistic love, blending traditional metaphors and modern day idiom in a peculiar manner. A part of the installation is a projection of a concert played by turbofolk icon Ceca at the Marakana Stadium in Belgrade. She integrates seemingly paradoxical positions such as democratic reformation, tradition and Serb nationalism in one person. She is a celebrated superstar and simultaneously the widow of the war criminal known as "Arkan", who was murdered in 2001 and with whom she owned a football club. Arkan was the leader of one of the paramilitary units responsible for the worst massacres of Bosnians and Croatians during the last Balkan war. In spite of this, Ceca remains seemingly intangible in the perception of a large following in the Balkan states. Moreover she integrates everything and ambivalently remains beyond fixed positions. The exhibition and its spatial staging touches the limits of such ambivalence. Movement and transparency and its inversion complete each other, forming different surfaces: the accessible space, simultaneously concealing the insights, opens up, "monitors", and hence mystifies.

Tillmann Terbuyken, Tim Voss