Prototype Laboratory Zastava Factory, 2006
c-print
30 x 45 cm

 

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Test Pieces and Blend-In Moments
Alan Phelan and Sarah Pierce
Curated by Sandra Grozdanic
SKC Gallery,
Galerija SKC Studentski Kulturi Centar Kralja Milana 48, Belgrade,
Serbia & Montenegro
4 -11 April 2006

 

 

 

click here for installation shots from SKC

press release from SKC show PDF

 

 

 

Trees Can’t Talk, 2006
c-print and adhesive vinyl
print 30 x 45 cm
vinyl 300 x 50 cm

 

Goran’s Stealth Yugo
diazo print
450 x 200 cm

 

 

 

Light Fixture Disguised as a Tree, 2006
plastic, wood, metal
60 x 100 x 50 cm

 

The National Derby, 2006
DVD video
duration: 2:54 mins

 

 

 
TEST PIECES AND BLEND-IN MOMENTS was a joint exhibition by ALAN PHELAN and SARAH PIERCE. Both artists are based in Dublin and came to Belgrade on a short residency.

ALAN PHELAN’s practice involves the production of objects, participatory events and projects, curating and writing. These all inform and contribute to an interest in the narrative potential surrounding an artwork, located in an intertextual context. This places process as central to the artwork resulting in provisional or incomplete works, often presented as unmade but notably not fragmented or deconstructed. During his time in Serbia, Phelan has collaborated with car designer Goran Krstic from Zastava Automobili, Kragujevac, to produce a three dimensional drawing of the Zastava car currently produced by the factory. This and other works explore moments of cultural and social translation or ‘blending-in’. This term comes from a ‘stealth’ industry which seeks disguise or camouflage technology, for example disguising a mobile phone mast as a tree. Between language and social engagement the works are possibilities for re-engineering and different interpretations for both classic designs, machinery and car culture.

Over the past three-and-a-half years, SARAH PIERCE has developed The Metropolitan Complex—a project that taps into locality and shared neuroses of ‘place’. She uses a variety of discourses, often opening these structures to the personal and the incidental. In the gallery at SKC, Pierce draws on her interests in the relationship between 1970s radical practices and contemporary models of art-making. She has collaborated with SKC’s archivist Dragica Vukadinovic to explore material related to SKC’s beginnings (1971). This research, along with a display of test-pieces contributed by art students from the Faculty of Art (Sculpture Department) at Beograd University propose a site of formative moments, not quite art, but not in the realm of pure documentation. During the week, Pierce will use SKC as a base to renegotiate these histories in the present, filtering her ‘presence’ in the gallery through an accumulation of meetings and one-to-one conversations.