If we don’t organize ourselves, others will organize us!

In Eastern Europe there is a huge dichotomy between high-quality individual art production and national art institutions, which are in most cases underdeveloped or they exist (with some honourable exceptions) only in some basic forms and are very local in their nature. Many times, they are not only underdeveloped, but also developed in a wrong direction. We artists were motivated to create and co-create elements of the art system that would enable us to live and work in such harsh conditions. Self-organization was and still is one of our most important tasks.

We had no choice: if we wanted to stay and work in our countries we had to construct our reality by accelerating the production of non-exiting elements of the art system: producing and publishing theory, public and private collections of contemporary art, appropriate educational institutions for contemporary art practice and theory, and so on. Self-organization in the context of Easter Europe had a different goal than in the countries with an established art system. Together with the IRWIN group and other initiatives and individuals, I have been involved since the beginning of the 1990s in various projects that aimed to construct the missing elements of the art system in the environments in which we live and work.