Interview: What, How & for Whom

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view.

Why are you called WHW?

The title of our curatorial collective is What, How & for Whom. We have been working together since 1999 and we’re based in Zagreb in Croatia. The title of our collective is taken from our first project which was realized in Zagreb in 2000. It was dedicated to the 152nd anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and I think that a short summary of that project can give the audience an idea of the kind of work we’ve been doing since.

Our work is strongly linked to social and political circumstances in Croatia. We started working in the postwar period; in times of heavy amnesia about socialist and communist past, of complete disconnection from all our neighbours from former Yugoslavia disconnection from other cultural scenes, and also in times of heavy nationalism and xenophobia. We tried to structure our first project as a kind of cultural intervention and we decided to talk about The Communist Manifesto, which was not, in any way, present in the public sphere in Croatia at the time. Basically the impetus to do the project came from the publishing house Arzin which republished The Communist Manifesto in 1998, on its 150th anniversary. The book with the preface by Slavoj Žižek, went totally unnoticed. So we wanted to see if, through the medium of an exhibition, we could challenge people and start a discussion about it. We decided to focus the exhibition on the issues of art and economy, and this is why we chose these 3 questions; What, How & for Whom, because they are, in fact, the basic questions of any economic organization. We wanted to explore the ways in which they can be used, and should be used again and again. We have been continuously interested in following the red threads through different generations and linking the voices that have been trying to experiment and challenge the socio-political situation in different ways. The axis of our work has been trying to continuously ask What, How & for Whom in different social, cultural, and political circumstances and to try to see where these questions lead us - usually towards the things that we feel are kind of swept under the carpet and that are worth insisting on.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Alexander Ugay & Vlado Martek.

What does the title Ground Floor America refer to?

Ground Floor America is a book written by Russian satirical writers Ilf and Petrov in 1936, and it really is, without a doubt, a hilarious book. Basically, it’s the experience of official reporters sent by Pravda magazine to make a book and also a series of articles about their journey to the United States. On one hand, they were reporters who were sent away with the certain burden of expectations, meaning that it was clear that they were supposed to look at America with a Soviet perspective, on the other hand, they were really mesmerized and impressed by the United States. Of course they were also criticizing it, since they were there in a time of heavy economic crisis, talking about unemployment, impoverishment, and also racial and nationalistic problems in the United States. Another thing that was interesting was how they kept being faced with the fact that it was impossible to represent or summarize what America is, and of course this was not only their experience but this also kept coming up in conversations with people. Whenever they would ask someone what America is, they would always send them somewhere else and in the end they say then they just ended up with people pointing their fingers in vague directions and saying that that is where America is.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Darinka Pop-Mitic.

So in a way, we thought this was interesting, 70 years later, again in a time of economic crisis, to question the issues of geography’s representation and position of contemporary art and this is why we link this to our 2 years of travel. We’ve been travelling for curatorial research for the 11th Istanbul Biennial called What Keeps Mankind Alive that we curated last year. We did intensive research in the areas of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus and Middle East and we were very much interested in the way in which this research works - what gets excluded / what gets included in this kind of high-key representational exhibition. We were also very much interested in the issues of representation and also cultural translation, for example, how certain works that have very strong influence or function as an intervention in a very specific situation and local context function, and what kind of language they must use to communicate outside this context. We were interested in how these kinds of 'ghost geographies' are shaped and how certain projects try to summarize them and deconstruct them. These regions share problems of the position of contemporary art, which is often considered as kind of a foreign import, something connected to the West. They also share similar troubles with modernity, with their recent histories, with the questions of amnesia, archives, problems with neighbours, borders, and so on.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: SKART.		Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Guram Tsibakhashvili.

What kind of mood does the exhibition Ground Floor America convey?

In terms of mood, we would say a lot of these works are ironic, and we can say humorous, but there is also a lot of very serious work in different kinds of media and languages conveying many layers of the specific social situation they were developed in. Maybe to put it simple, just like when Ilf and Petrov were travelling through the United States and the United States kept evading them, in a way they were looking at America but actually were very much talking about the Soviet Union at the time. So maybe what we would like to achieve is also to play with this notion that by showing these works from so-called exotic geographies, that one can see something that concerns us here, and that also concerns us all. It’s not just a humourous play. One can use humour in a subversive way, just like Ilf and Petrov did. So it’s not necessarily entertaining but it’s definitely not dead serious.

Factory of Found Clothes (Gluklya & Tsaplya): Three Mothers and a Chorus, 2007. 33 min.

What reactions do WHW expect or hope to receive?

Any reaction is a good reaction because we are dealing with contemporary art!

Maybe it’s easier to say what we would like to avoid. We are really not interested in showing this as a kind of exotica coming from foreign cultures. We don’t want it to be perceived as a dialogue between cultures opposed to each other. We don’t want it to seem like these clichés that are very much shaping our media and our understanding of intercultural dialogue. We are very interested in the slips in translations, we are interested in misunderstandings. We hope those misunderstandings can open spaces for something that we cannot predict – so maybe those would be the kind of the reactions we would like. Nothing fixed, but maybe to create some chaos that could be useful in unpredictable ways.

Thank you.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Guram Tsibakhashvili.

Jinoos Taghizadeh: Cafe Konj Performances, årstal ukendt. Installation view.		Jinoos Taghizadeh: Cafe Konj Performances, årstal ukendt. Detalje.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Orkhan Huseynov.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Tigran Khachatryan.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Vyacheslav Akhunov.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Vlado Matek.		Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Vahid Sharifian & Maha Maamoun.

Ground Floor America, 2010. Installation view: Yelena & Victor Vorobyev & Vahid Sharifian.