Perfect Strangers
Triple Canopy in Sarajevo with Azra Akšamija, Adela Jušić, Mladen Miljanović, Radenko Milak, and Muharem Bazdulj
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
June 21–July 6, 2012

Between June 21 and July 6, Triple Canopy editors will work with five artists and writers from Bosnia on a series of workshops and discussions dealing with idiosyncratic sites, figures, and objects with ambivalent relationships to the region’s traumatic recent history and concurrent forging of national identities. Triple Canopy editors and participants will choose places, things, and images whose meanings have not yet congealed but instead lead in contradictory directions. Rather than turning to emblems of entrenched narratives, rather than marking or restoring parts of the landscape in order to memorialize victims, preserve memories, or reveal a path to national rejuvenation, we’ll attend to the meanings that cannot so easily be recouped and repackaged, that resist easy interpretation, much less definition. Among them: the Olympic bobsled track turned front-line barricade in the mid-90s; the popular Serbian Zastava 101 automobile; rejuvenated Bosnian black markets; the extra J that transforms a word from Serbian to Bosnian and Croatian; nascent national beverages, fashionable typefaces, suburban mosques, prominent branding campaigns.

These objects of inquiry will provide the basis for installations, performances, walks, and talks around Sarajevo; public presentations and discussions with invited guests; and contributions to Triple Canopy’s online magazine. Additionally, they will be represented in a book produced under the auspices of Triple Canopy’s Volume Number series, which provides a variable space for thinking through—and collaboratively enacting—the practice of publication and instantiating the public spaces magazines purport to produce in the world. This book, Perfect Strangers: A Catalogue of Ordinary Icons, will be published in the winter and will include documentation of public programs as well as elaborations of the projects discussed and conceived in Sarajevo. The materials—artist projects, prose, poetry, fiction, photography, transcripts, documents, emails, screen shots, coupons, receipts—will be organized as alphabetical entries, resulting in a subjective, selective lexicon of the Balkan imaginary, and of an imaginary Balkans. Contributors will include the participating artists and writers, attendees from Bosnia and Serbia and abroad, Triple Canopy editors, and a number of commissioned respondents who will not be present in Sarajevo.

View the program schedule »

Read a recent article on “Perfect Strangers” in Art in America »

Perfect Strangers is organized in collaboration with NO(W), the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art/pro. ba, Collegium Artisticum, Kriterion, and the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and CultureShutdown.net, with the support of CEC Artslink. Special thanks to Pierre Courtin, Asja Hafner, Branka Vujanović, Vildana Drljević, Elma Hasimbegović, and Aida Salketić.