Who's in town?
Branko Franceschi and Başak Şenova

SALT Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema

The atomic shelter ARK in Konjic, located 45km south of Sarajevo, was built between 1959 and 1973, yet it was only revealed as a military secret 9 years ago. Through the Project Biennial D-0 Ark Underground, this bunker, which was built for the Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito and 350 chosen others, is now planned to operate as a hybrid museum both for military and contemporary art.

35 projects are currently presented under the paired curatorial statements of Branko Franceschi and Başak Şenova titled The Castle and Time Cube. These projects are on show in the bunker along with others from the first edition that took place in 2011.

In the 2013 edition of the biennial, public programs and the publication Project Biennial D-0 ARK Underground, Bosnia and Herzegovina added to the proceedings. The book provides an overall representation of the biennial and unfolds the content chronologically, shaped by the curatorial and artistic content of the biennial’s two editions. It also aims to explain the engagement of the biennial with the cultural and the political substance of the bunker in the frame of a larger cultural discourse taking place in the Balkan region and beyond.

Branko Franceschi acts as the director of the Virtual Museum of the Avant-garde Art and the president of the Institute for the Research of Avant-garde since 2010. In 2005, he initiated Biennial of Quadrilateral in Rijeka, Croatia. He was the curator of the Croatian pavilion at the 16th São Paulo Biennial (2004); he also worked on the 2nd International Biennial in Prag (2005); 52nd Venice Biennial (2007); 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennial (2008); 55th Venice Biennial (2013) and was a member of the curatorial team of the International Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest (2006, 2012).

Başak Şenova writes on art, technology and media, initiates and develops projects and has curated exhibitions since 1995. She is editorial correspondent for ibraaz.org and one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of “ctrl_alt_del” and “Upgrade!Istanbul”. Şenova was the curator of the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). She teaches at Koç University, İstanbul and co-curates the ongoing “UNCOVERED” (2010-2013) project in Cyprus. Recently, she was appointed Art Gallery Chair (ACM) “SIGGRAPH 2014”, Vancouver, Canada.

The talk will be held in English.