# 2
Welcome to issue 02,
Thanks to everyone who took time to send feedback, it's very much appreciated, as are your kind words of support. Very special thanks go to each artist who very generously submitted work. What can't be included here will be included in later issues.
issue 02 has taken longer than planned getting to you due to many factors, not least of which is an incredibly long and hot summer and watching our wee baby growing into a wee boy.
While it might be said that artistic production generally seeks to communicate its context and the will of the artist the works featured in this issue share intent to amplify that communication and expand on context. They further share a discourse of encounter, each artist coming at it from different perspectives. The invisible, or absent presence of Ivana Keser imbues her newspapers with a sense of socialisation that manages through her own subjectivity to commune with the (equally unseen) reader in ways that the Body often cannot. Aleksandar Battista Ilic's 10-year performance project ‘ Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill' expands on this notion of absence and presence by having located itself privately in a number of weekend walks up Medvednica mountain on the outskirts of Zagreb, and then latterly in the performing of the documentation by the photographed subjects. Such dual purpose of work that is rooted in action to lens challenges notions of audience and performer. Rolf Langebartels makes everyone a performer in his ‘ Table Concert' , further blurring the boundaries of participation and authorship, while Darko Fritz turns towards surveillance as encounter. We republish the text ‘ Art, Insanity and Crime' in which Jindrich Chalupecky traces the avant-garde encounter of 1960's Czechoslovakia through the work of Alex Mlynarcik's "Second Permanent Manifestation”.
There are .PDF downloads of the front pages of Ivana Keser's newspapers and selected writings, a text by Darko Fritz on the history of Media Art in Croatia, and a healthy shot of theory courtesy of association APSOLUTNO: ‘The Semiotics of Confusion' , written during the Balkans war and NATO aggression.
Happy viewing and happy reading!
Be strong,
Love life,
agora8 has been set up as a digital research station holding examples of Contemporary Art practices that generally have enjoyed limited exposure. This is due on one hand to constraining political contexts and location, and on the other to the marginalisation by the culture industries of context driven and ephemeral art practices.
agora8 can be understood methodologically as a chronotope, a gate through which (historical) acts and (performed) events, take on flesh. It provides access to past events through adoption of a particular behaviour towards archival culture that generates a re-animation and examination of Contextual Art practices. It engages with works that happened in other places in other times while simultaneously providing access to an audience that could not be physically present in the space and time of production.
