Dunja Blažević

TV Gallery
Production TV Beograd, 1984–1990

TV Gallery was first researched and presented as part of the project Political Practices of (Post) Yugoslavian Art, jointly organized by kuda.org (Novi Sad), Prelom kolektiv (Beograd), SCCA/pro.ba (Sarajevo) and WHW (Zagreb).

Dunja Blažević, a curator and art historian, whose leadership profiled the Gallery of the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade during the 1970s and made it a space open to artistic experiments, new media and critical perspectives, powerful international cooperation and cooperation amongst artists in the former Yugoslavia, moved to work for Television Belgrade in 1981. From 1981, she worked as a producer of video contributions on contemporary art for programmes like On Fridays at 22 and Another Art (Petkom u 22 and Druga Umetnost). This series grew to become a regular monthly programme entitled TV Gallery (TV Galerija), which was broadcast on the Yugoslav network until 1991. TV Gallery is an important document of interdisciplinary, socially engaged artistic and curator practice and even today, remains an unsurpassed model of conceptual public television and of the place of art within it.

The emergence of TV Gallery in the television media in the Yugoslav context is connected to and in a way made possible due to what was happening in the very contemporary art of the 70s and 80s, marked by the ideas of democratisation of reception and production of contemporary art (due to the work of the artists within the "new artistic practice", abandoning traditional artistic premises (galleries and museums) and traditional artistic media (so-called new media, extended media), tactical utilisation of the media, participation, collectivity, change in the status of the author and similar. Television is seen as the "natural" media environment of video art, and gallery screenings of video art seems a partial solution. Today this idea, this hope, is almost completely abandoned and forgotten.

Dunja Blažević's programmes drew on the topics of a widely understood contemporary art (from the historic avant garde to conceptual art and so-called new artistic practices, video art, design, comics, even literature), they were not limited by "genres", the length of the programme was not firmly determined, and the music for the programme reflected the obvious impact of the then still modern "new wave". The programmes are interesting as a symptom not only of the cultural and artistic scene of Yugoslavia at the time, but also of the public television, society and state where such projects were possible. Today the preserved recordings of these broadcast can be seen as the materialised remnants of an ideology which is an explicit reminder that such experiments are unthinkable in today's media space of public television, which would find these programmes formally elitist, non-commercial and boring for its public audience.