East Side Stories
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
14 min
Igor Grubic
The installation “East Side Story” is based on events that took place in the streets of Belgrade in 2001 and Zagreb in 2002, during the Gay Pride demonstrations, where the participants were the victims of verbal and physical injury by neo-Nazi groups and other citizens. This work is composed of two projections: the first uses television images of the demonstrations while the second is the reconstitution of the events performed by dancers. This piece witnesses nationalism at work in society, aiming particularly at the “internal enemy that sexual minorities might represent”. The use of performance and dance symbolizes creative freedom as well as the possibility to free the body from the public space. The performer’s body sends a signal in the public space in a society lacking social solidarity. This is a counter- monument or a monument of extreme fragility that reactivates repressed images. Aware that art produces hardly any political effects, Grubic keeps on questioning the power of symbolic gestures. According to him this work, full of emotions and intensity, is an aesthetic act of resistance.
Having started his carrier as an activist artist, Igor Grubic became known in 1998 through an action made in tribute to the group RED PERISTYL that had painted in red, the floor in front of Diocletian’s Palace in Split as a provocative gesture against totalitarism. Thirty years later, he reactivated this gesture as a response to a different context in which nationalism and corruption are appearing in different countries of the former Communist bloc experiencing a period of transition. Since then he has performed symbolic actions in the public space recalling May 68 political, as well as anti-fascist, values. His belief in the necessity of individual action is strong. In order to address social and political topics, he prefers using the transgressive power of poetic language rather than critical discourse. Igor Grubic has participated in many international exhibitions including Manifesta.
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