AMSTERDAM.- Galerie Ron Mandos is presenting For God and My Country, an exhibition of new works by Ivan Grubanov (1976), a former Rijksakademie resident and representative of the Serbian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. In his installations and paintings made of flags and worker suits, the Serbian artist explores the notion of nationalism. Through his memories of the bloody civil conflict that broke the former Yugoslavia apart, the artist addresses the question what it means to be part of a nation, and what it means to be associated with a national identity.

For God and My Country (Installation)

For God and My Country is an installation with chairs, flags, and a worker suit. It involves a nationally articulated slogan, derived from the Latin “Pro Deo et patria”, which is a motto used by many families, educational institutions, and military regiments, such as the American Legion. Grubanov regularly uses borrowed national mottos to question their meaning and power they hold over people. He thinks it is ironic and absurd that people believe in mottos used strictly to control them.

In the installation, Grubanov recreated a conference room of a sort, where the delegated representatives are former national flags and a worker suit. The flags and the suit have been covered with multiple layers of paint, thus transforming the ideological properties of the objects. Symbolically, the installation is an assembly of former ideals, being the result of people blindly following the national slogan ‘For God and My Country’, which is presented in three-dimensional letters on the wall behind it. By painting over the flags, the former ideals are decomposed. The whole national construction is deconstructed and lost. What remains are a set of utilitarian objects you can sit on.

Paintings

Ivan Grubanov’s paintings presented in the show involve a three-dimensional letter drawing and diagrams embroidered on the surface of the canvas in a flag-making workshop. The diagrams are deconstructed flags, recreated in different forms to acquire new meanings. The letter drawings symbolize a reality that is present regardless of the two-dimensional illusion of the painterly work on canvas. Throughout the exhibition one can find the slogans of several nation states:

“Finit Coronat opus” is a national motto of the Seychelles and means “the end crowns the work”; “Por La Razon o la Fuerza” is the national motto of Chili and means “By reason or force”; and “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here” is the national motto of Liberia, a republic in West Africa founded in the early nineteenth century by freed American and Caribbean slaves.

The national motto is a sentence so powerful it is almost magical. People identify themselves with these mottos and are moved by them because they think they are sacred. They are more powerful than poetry. Poetry can trigger your emotions on a Platonic level. You can feel empathy, sorrow or happiness, for instance. A national motto triggers more than that, it moves masses of people. They go to war for it. It is this extreme potency that Grubanov is interested it. He isolates the mottos and puts them on a canvas. By overpainting, obscuring and highlighting them, he changes their connotations. He brings them in new environments where they resonate differently.




Polyptychs

The Unnation polyptychs consist of two different entities leveled through the notion of painting: two metamorphosed flags that have been used in the painting process and the direct result of their specific painterly stroke on three canvases. All strokes of paint are made by the flags that have also become part of the composition. The immediacy of the ‘flag’ stroke on canvas is accompanied by the slow process of flags absorbing paint and gradually layering the paint. This works sometimes take several years to complete.

Seeing the flags and canvases combined, there is a circular motion as if Grubanov is still painting. The polyptychs are performative pieces referencing the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock. Like Pollock, Grubanov has his flags and canvases lying on the ground, spilling paint on the flags and using the flags as brushes, hence developing his very own painting technique.

Country Above Self

The installation Country Above Self hangs at the entrance of the gallery. The title of the work is a borrowed national motto, used in the coat of arms of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Its origin is not relevant, as is the poetic fiber it uses to operate on its subjects. Having the installation lifted above the viewers imposes a visceral and violent limitation, a barrier of a sort that blocks the ultimate perspective of openness: the above. Through his installation Grubanov questions the meaning and symbolic power of flags. Is it ok to put our country above ourselves? What does it mean to be associated with a nation, especially when its reputation is stained by a history of violence?

Unnationing

In the Unnationing works, Grubanov addresses the question what it means to be part of a nation-state, what it means to try to leave national membership, or what it means if others associate you with a particular nation-state, and therefore with the reputation the state carries. Unnation refers to people living in highly exceptional circumstances: they have abandoned their homeland and national identity and are in that way ‘unnational’.

“Unnation” as a verb draws its origin from the mid-17th century, when it signified a physical condition, from a union, a collective body united through the mercy of divinity, to the breakage of both the collective and their abstract bond. Unnation involves the loss of a claim to a nation and a homeland. It means losing the right, strength and passion to maintain a nation’s physical borders. The breaking up of the former Yugoslavia is an example of many people, including Ivan Grubanov, being unnationed. Another case of unnationing that inspires Grubanov are the migrants waiting at the border of the EU.

“That is what I picture through my artwork, the recordings left by unnationing, the scars of its movement and the trails of its presence. The pieces of cloth resemble lying bodies, their shapes and wrinkles are remnants of communities too brief to leave a solid trace. They hang on the fences of camps and the razor wire at the borders to testify to the birth of the Unnation, the community formed right there, the pieces of cloth being its settlements, its uniforms, its flags, marking the lands of its passage, creating fissures in the previous reality and establishing a new one.”
— Ivan Grubanov, Unnation, p. 105

Ivan Grubanov has established his international career through numerous solo, group, and biennial exhibitions worldwide, as well as many artistic and scholarly awards. Solo shows include Laboratorio 987 at MUSAC in Leon, Le Grand Cafe Centre d’Art Contemporain in St Nazaire, and Stroom Center for Contemporary Art in Den Haag. Participations in group shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Witte de With in Rotterdam, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, the 1st Thessaloniki Biennial, Stedelijk Museum CS, SMART Project Space and De Appel in Amsterdam, the Drawing Center and Apex Art in New York, Kunsthalle Bern, ARCOS Museum in Benevento, Museum De Beyerd in Breda, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon.