Grupa Škart (Dragan Protic & Djordje Balmazovic) Hallo / I love you / Bye-bye http://www.archined.nl/archined/2415.html

participants

Hello/I love you/Bye-bye is a triptych about the meaning of the fast exchange of memory, emotions and life in the transforming city, compressed into a single object like a child's toy. It was inspired by a found object in a friend's apartment - a toy telephone with only three call buttons for three different sound options. Depending upon the button selected, one is greeted by a voice saying: Hello, I Love you or Bye-Bye. Grupa Škart printed an edition of three posters to be displayed in private or public spaces. Škart related each of the three posters to each of the voices by thematically reproducing photographs women from three different post-war decades, set in three different social situations.

The first poster (Hello) shows a group of women from the '50s enjoying themselves during a break from work. The second (I Love You) is an image from the '60s of a young girl playing with a toy in front of her family house, sitting among a thousand other toys. The third poster (Bye-Bye) presents an image of a teenage girl during the '70s posing for a collective photograph traditionally taken at the end of high-school final exams. However, because she was tutored privately and did not have class-mates, she stands alone in front of the forest with no classmates around her. The posters confirm that cultural transformation can be found in an instant as a minimal, compressed memory, contained in the form of a banal product. Apparently independent of the content that it carries, the toy can play a double role in the face of Belgrade's recent historical transformation: an everyday object that has been transformed from its original function (i.e. from a telephone to a toy) becomes a playful means of understanding the many changes in urban memory.

Biography

ŠKART is one of Europe's most well-known art action groups, founded in 1990 by Dragan Protic and Djordje Balmazovic. The group participates in exhibitions with installations and concepts. Sight, sound and surprise are their tools. They have mounted more than 10 solo exhibitions and participated in international group-art events. SKART has won various awards (Silver Medal - World Exhibition of Intentions: Eureka, Brussels, 1993). SKART also produces graphic design for several theatre festivals, art events and radio. As visual artists and experimental graphic designers with a strong attachment to community-based work, they have initiated and participated in many collaborative projects related to particular uncertain and traumatic social issues; very often the street is the medium in which they act.