Zoran Todorović

Gypsies and Dogs

Video still, 2007

Gypsies and Dogs (2007) is a two-channel video installation, blind filmed with micro-cameras worn by beggar children and stray dogs. The filming technique and technology used yielded unclear image and sound, with abrupt breaks and changes of angle and fluctuations in the intensity and quality of sound. The overall effect thus produced is disturbing and tiring also on the physiological level. The technical brutality and aggressiveness of the work finds its linguistic counterpart in the title, which denotes the content of the work with deliberate political incorrectness. The work was first presented in 2009 at the artist’s solo show Intensity of Affects in the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad, and then again a few months later at the 50 th October Salon Circumstance (2009). There it triggered a fierce polemic between cultural workers, activists, legal experts, theorists, curators and artists about representations of identity or the right to representation of marginal, socially vulnerable and/or minority groups; and on the other hand, about the responsibility of artists (or art) to respect human rights. Todorović has gathered the polemical texts in the form of a book (electronic and hardcopy) as a document of the (already realized) discursive potential of this video work. 

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Zoran Todorović (born in Belgrade, 1965) lives and works in Belgrade. He is an associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Arts in Belgrade, where he teaches transmedia research at the Department of New Media, which he helped establish. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in major art institutions and at festivals of new media at home and abroad, among them the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina; the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; Artspace Sydney; Ars Electronica, Linz; ZKM Karlsruhe; the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), Glasgow; Lux Centre, London; Transmediale, Berlin; Art in General, New York; World- Information, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Blood and Honey, the Essl Collection, Vienna, Austrian Cultural Forum New York. He represented Serbia at the 53 rd Venice Biennale. His works are included in important public and private art collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.