Programs

Triple Canopy and Siglio are pleased to present an evening in which two artist-writers dissolve the boundaries between the visual and the literary, the digital and the analogue, by probing the spaces of the in-between. Challenging notions of what forms a book can take and how readers read, Amaranth Borsuk and Erica Baum each craft highly original works in which language and image interact in playful and provocative ways. From Baum’s uncanny poems, made by folding the pages of old paperbacks, to Borsuk’s epistolary romance that can only be read in augmented reality, this multi-media evening will include performances and a discussion moderated by Triple Canopy editor Dan Visel.

Amaranth Borsuk recently won the Slope Poetry prize for her collection Handiwork. She is also the author of the chapbook Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010) and a collaborative work Excess Exhibit (ZG Press). Her poems, essays, and translations have been published widely in journals such as the New American Writing, Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Black Warrior Review, Aufgabe, and ZYZZYVA, among many others. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and begins teaching this fall at the University of Washington-Bothell. Her book Between Page and Screen is recently out from Siglio.

Erica Baum lives and works in New York. She has exhibited in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City, Berlin, and Mälmo, Sweden. Her work was included in the book Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon Press, 2006) and in the recent exhibition “Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Recent solo exhibitions include “Shuffled Glances” at Bureau, New York, NY, and “Erica Baum: The Public Imagination at Circuit” in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her artist books include Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), Sighting (onestar press, 2011) and Bbabaubaumbaudevin (Regency Arts Press, 2012). Her piece "The Melody Indicator" was published in issue 16 of Triple Canopy.

Siglio is an independent press in Los Angeles dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersection of art and literature. Siglio books defy categorization and ignite conversation: they are cross-disciplinary, hybrid works that subvert paradigms, reveal unexpected connections, rethink narrative forms, and thoroughly engage a reader’s imagination and intellect. We believe that challenging work can be immensely appealing: our books are as much a pleasure to touch and hold as they are to read.

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.

Perfect Strangers will develop original ways of thinking about how the work and identities of artists in the region circulate among the myths, misnomers, and misunderstandings that so often mark the context of international reception—and thus inevitably shape the conditions of production, and lead to the calcification of the symbolic repertoire. Triple Canopy editors and participants will discuss how artists and writers might productively evade and intervene in these discursive systems; misuse or abuse familiar, staid symbols and adopt new and defamiliarizing ones without sacrificing the social and historical complexity of their work. These problems will be reflected in the content of the work as well as the forms of its publication.

June 26 at Collegium Artisticum, 6:30 p.m.
Mladen Miljanović presents a genealogy of the Zastava 101, the stable and affordable automobile produced in Serbia from 1974 until 2008 without significant changes to its design. The Zastava, which was extremely popular throughout the former Yugoslavia, became emblematic of the region's economic and social stagnation, and often figures into Miljanović's artwork. Radenko Milak screens and discusses the 1958 promotional film for Novi Travnik, designed as a prototype for Yugoslavian socialist cities and promoted under the banner "new factory, new ideas of life." Followed by a conversation moderated by Triple Canopy's Molly Kleiman.

June 27 at Collegium Artisticum, 6:30 p.m.
Muharem Bazdulj discusses Arizona Market, a sprawling complex of stalls outside Bosnia's Brčko District, where disused, forgotten, or stolen objects acquire a currency that has as much to do with their historical resonance and the social relations facilitated by improvised capitalism as their economic value. Bazdulj will be joined by Brooklyn-based writer and Triple Canopy contributor Joshua Cohen in a conversation moderated by Triple Canopy's Sarah Resnick.

July 3 at Kriterion, 6:30 p.m.
Adela Jušić delves into Sniper Ghost Warrior 2: Sarajevo Urban Combat, a first-person shooter scheduled for release in August. The video game, set in besieged Sarajevo, features American-accented "ghost warriors" who defend the city from an attacking army—a historical corrective, or perhaps a creative diversion overwriting the collective trauma. Azra Akšamija analyzes the forms of mosques built in post-war Sarajevo, using three case studies to show how cultural memory is erased only to be reinvented. Followed by a conversation moderated by Triple Canopy's Alexander Provan.

July 4 at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 5 p.m.
Azra Akšamija, in collaboration with CultureShutdown.net and Triple Canopy, invites the public to initiate the collection of a new, portable venue for Bosnian cultural heritage, in response to the recent closure of the country's institutions due to lack of funding. Participants are invited to bring toys, pictures, tools, keepsakes, trinkets, and other objects they wish to be part of the collection, housed in a mobile vitrine and called Model for a Future Wing of the Museum. Documentation of the collection will appear on CultureShutdown.net, an online platform created in response to the crisis facing Bosnia's cultural institutions.

Perfect Strangers is organized in collaboration with Duplex/10m2, the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art/pro.ba, Collegium Artisticum, Kriterion, 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.

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Azra Akšamija is a Sarajevo-born artist and architectural historian and is currently an assistant professor at MIT's program in art, culture, and technology. Akšamija’s work investigates the ability of art and architecture to facilitate transformative mediation in cultural and political conflicts, and in so doing provide a framework for researching, analyzing, and intervening in contested situations and places. Her recent projects have focused on the representation of Islamic identities in the West, spatial mediation of identity politics, and cultural pedagogy through art and architecture.

Muharem Bazdulj was born in 1977 in Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina (formerly Yugoslavia). He has published several novels and award-winning short story collections, including Druga knjiga (2000), which was translated into English and published as The Second Book in 2005 by Northwestern University Press. Bazdulj’s work has been featured in international anthologies such as The Wall In My Head, published on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Best European Fiction 2012, published by Dalkey Archive Press and edited by Aleksandar Hemon. His short stories and essays have appeared in World Literature Today, Creative Nonfiction, Habitus, and Absinthe, among other literary reviews.

Adela Jušić is an artist working in video, installation, and performance and living in Sarajevo. She is a founding member of the Crvena Association for Culture and Art. In 2010 she received the Zvono Award for best young artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her work has been exhibited at Manifesta 8, Kunstmuseum (Bonn, Germany), El Parqueadero (Bogotá, Colombia), Espace Appolonia (Strasbourg, France); the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, and Gallery P74 (Ljubljana).

Radenko Milak is a painter and curator based in Banja Luka. In 2005 he co-founded the Protok Centre for Visual Communications, an alternative art space in Banja Luka that is active throughout Bosnia and the region. From 2008 until 2010 he was the director of SpaPort, an annual international art exhibition. He is currently a professor at the Faculty for Information Technology and Design in Banja Luka.

Mladen Miljanović is an artist working and living in Banja Luka. In 2007 he received the Zvono Award for best young artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has exhibited at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Vienna), and Smack Mellon (New York). In addition to his performances, new-media productions, and research-based work, Miljanović deals with the social and therapeutic aspects of art by organizing workshops for the disabled.

In 1973 and 1974, Samuel Beckett translated a set of his prose poems, Foirades, into English as Fizzles. (The French “diarrhea” or “shit” becomes a slightly more ambiguous English.) Foirades/Fizzles entered into limited circulation as an elegant collaboration with Jasper Johns, published by Petersburg Press; in 1976, Grove Press produced an expanded run. Johns’s etchings emphasize his calligraphic and repetitive style. Of one fizzle, Marjorie Perloff has commented that the “phrasing is that of a telegram.”

On June 4, Triple Canopy will host an hour-long interpretation of Beckett and Johns’s artist book by the New York–based Piehole theater group. Incorporating theater, dance, electroacoustic sound, and live and recorded video projection, Piehole’s The Fizzles promises a compellingly imperfect meeting of media.

Directed by Tara Ahmadinejad
Co-produced by Piehole and Mud/Bone
Adapted by Tara Ahmadinejad, Allison Laplatney, and Jeff Wood
Dramaturgy by Elliot B Quick
Sound by Lea Bertucci
Video by Aniela Coveleski
Lighting Design by Vadim Ledvin
Choreography by Rebecca Warner
Performed by Alice Winslow, Allison Laplatney, Jeff Wood, Anne Troup, and Mark Lanham
Stage Managed by Alexandra Lubensky