Residency 2017/2018

The Residency Grant of the Leuphana Arts Program for 2016 has been awarded to the artist Katarina Ševic. After presenting her project at the Leuphana in spring of 2017, the artist will be involved in the university in various formats during the course of the year and will be able to use resources of the university to develop her artistic work. 

 

KATARINA ŠEVIC

VETERANS IN LIFE (about destruction)  

March 2017 – February 2018

In the frame of the project “Naming IT War,” Katarina Ševic works with an archive that includes more than 200 interviews conducted with Yugoslav war veterans, war participants and war opponents. The varied material is examined in regard to expressions of shame, fear or hate, and collective listening sessions are meant to enable a joint approach to the material and a shared listening experience. In her project draft, Ševic states on the content: 

“The archive was made in order to provide testimonies and to increase the production of knowledge capital, disseminating the realities of facts about the wars – their participants, causes and consequences. After listening to a part of this archive, and after meeting some of the veterans in person, I was struck not only by the complexity of the topic, but also by the relevance of these testimonies reaching outside the scope of a single country and a single war, and the urgency to deal with it in an international context. 

One of the issues I found most relevant was the difficulty of finding the answer to the excruciating question how do these testimonies in general transform not only our understanding of the recent past, but also of the world we live in today. More importantly, can the knowledge gained in this way help us understand what is happening today, in this period of intense migrations, since most of the people migrating come from the zones of armed con icts, some are veterans, most of them not, but they have all been participants in some kind of warfare. They have all been transformed (often traumatized) by their experiences, and transformed like this, they continue their lives elsewhere. At the same time, some of the veterans stay in their countries of origin and sometimes actively participate in the creation of its future. What impact does it all have on the societies emerging after the war, or on the society in general, since in one way or another, we all live in a post-traumatized society?”

Vita

Katarina Ševic (born in Serbia, studied in Budapest, lives in Berlin) deals with themes having to do with the connections between art, design and society and questioning normative, historical narratives. Her work is mostly formulated by a number of objects and presented with attendant performative situations and events and regularly also with texts or stories. She has participated in many solo and group shows at, among others, OFF Biennale Budapest, Le 19 CRAC, Monbelliard; acb Galerie, Budapest; Spielzeit / Les Ateliers de Rennes, Rennes; New Museum, New York; Sezession, Vienna; Museum for Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad; 21er Haus, Vienna; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Apexart, New York. www.katarinasevic.com

The Residency Program of the Leuphana Arts Program is funded by the Niedersächsische Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur.

Projects

THE CURFEW presentation in the frame of the OFF Biennale, Budapest

The Curfew was staged on 09/30 and 10/28/2017 at six different public spaces in Budapest.  

The play “The Curfew” is an alternative form of a public demonstration. 

A troupe roams the streets of Budapest, pushing a three-meter-high, egg-shaped megaphone. They make noise and stop at busy public squares to stage their play on the glorification of a group of security guards as a choir. The members of the group vow to give people back their voices, from whom they took them away beforehand. With their presence, the troupe will prove that the streets and squares of Budapest can be spaces of independent expression today. The project was developed by Katarina Ševic during her residency at the Leuphana Arts Program.

The residency program of the Leuphana Arts Program is funded by the Niedersächsische Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur.

Events

27th of January 2018
Opening "The Curfew" – A project by Katarina Šević and Gergely László in Archive Kabinett


12 of April 2018
Eröffnung TESTIMONY – TRUTH OR POLITICS. Formen der Erinnerung an die Jugoslawien-Kriege in Volkskundemuseum Wien
https://volkskundemuseum.at/testimony


27th of April 2017
Opening