STATEMENT

Real Presence is the biggest international workshop for emerging generation of artists currently existing in Balkan region. Particularity of workshop is in its experimental and cross-cultural approach thanks to which, from 2001 till now, it developed innovative and unconventional method of working with art students and emerging artists as alternative educational system developed in correspondence with classical art studying at the art schools and fine art academies.

Basic idea of this manifestation is to create a meeting point for emerging artists giving them a possibility to exchange experiences, realize collaborations and joint projects, in a city like Belgrade that, after long period of war crisis, cultural isolation and thorny transition, presented a need to open up its cultural boundaries.

The idea of Real Presence – an encounter of great number of young artists – emerged in 2001, immediately after the democratic change in Serbia. Upcoming generations of artists from Europe and other countries of the world have been invited to come to Belgrade and to contribute with their “real presence” to the process of “bridging the gap” of ten years of interrupted cultural exchange and closeness of this cultural milieu. 

Therefore Real Presence has been conceived in a way to become a sort of a bridge capable to rise above fragments of the past time and to construct new channels that could permit a dynamic flux of ideas, energies and visions for the future. In following years this bridge has been transformed to a powerful construction, to a sort of spontaneous and fluid behavioural architecture and in communicational network in constant evolution.

Thanks to more than 1000 participants, of we might say, “real presences” that crossed Belgrade and other territories and parts of the world, between 2001 and 2007, it is possible to consider this manifestation as unique of its kind, permanently engaged in opening the boundaries and developing new modes of educational and cultural engagement.

The workshop has, as a principal aim, to stimulate various and multiple aspects of creativity of young generations and to interwove art and real life. It has strong international, multimedia character, and through permanent activities (presentations, video screenings, performances, discussions, actions, as well as on site installations, painting and sculpture) wishes to affirm the actual possibility of the young artists and art students to move  spontaneously within different disciplines, media and expressive languages, and to articulate new, fresh and real positions, attitudes, concepts and reflections on global and individual life and reality.