Through the passage in the salon, a stripe goes on the wings of an airplane. In the passage in the salon, dogs bark, and the dogs are madmen. If you pass through the passage to the other side, maybe it’s the same side. And where does the passage in the salon come from?

This complex, two-part exhibition will take place in the Oto Bihalji-Merin Salon and in the Street Gallery in Belgrade and will present the works of collectives that maintain an exciting liminal status of constant content production somewhere between art and life.

Tribe F20 is a self-organized anonymous collective of people with the psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia F20. Bitlsti is a three-member self-initiated group that has been active for 10 years within the AKC Matrijaršija in Belgrade, consisting of users of the association for support of people with developmental disabilities, Our House. Both collectives have participated in collective exhibitions, performances, shows, and concerts. This is their first joint exhibition.

The passage in the salon implies impossible, invisible channels through which the spaces of life and art intersect, and in addition, it points to the exploration of adequate or possible spaces for exhibiting marginal art that is created without an exhibition purpose.
The exhibition will be realized as part of the final conference of the ARTIS project organized by the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Funded under the EU Horizon 2020 program, the ARTIS project dealt with the transformative potential of art on individuals and society. It brought together researchers from various scientific disciplines to study different aspects of artistic action. By documenting the reactions of thousands of people to visual art across Europe, the project aimed to understand the emotional consequences of encounters with art in institutional (museum, gallery) and everyday urban contexts.
For this reason, the exhibition's author team chose the Salon of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art (Belgrade/Jagodina) as the first location, a former personal and working space that has been transformed into a gallery, and for the second location, the passage in Bezistan, where the gallery is open to passersby without time restrictions. The team approaches the question of the transformative power of art from the standpoint that the proximity of art and life does not have its beginning in historical avant-garde and is not reflected in activism, but has always belonged to the life of the body and life relationships within the world (B. Kunst).

The exhibition's author team consists of Milica Ivić, Joanna Marcade Mot, and Sofia Pašalić, along with the collectives Tribe F20 and Bitlsti. The exhibition was realized as part of the collaboration between the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art and the Street Gallery from Belgrade.
The exhibition in the Oto Bihalji-Merin Salon will last from June 25 to July 9. The exhibition in the Street Gallery will open on June 27 and will last until July 11, 2024.

Photos: Marko Pavlović