Iza uma [Oslobođenje]

The intermedia music performance Beyond the Mind [ΔE×Δt≥ħ2×(1-(v^2/c^2))x∞] by Belma Bešlić-Gál, which opened this year’s Slovo Gorčina on July 26, could easily be mistaken for a convoluted and hermetic art project. However, the title alone suggests that it has other artistic intentions. While it is true that Belma Bešlić Gal has created an effective cutting-edge art concept inspired by various conceptual and avant-garde practices, she is essentially not a hermetic artist who wants to intellectualize, provoke or exhaust herself in difficult-to-understand artistic codes, riddles or intermedia quotations. Her visual-musical concept – the performance – is just the beginning, not a mere formality, because she is concerned about content as well, as we shall see.

Interventions in space

Slovo Gorčina’s program booklet states that the project is inspired by the poetry of Mak Dizdar, a statement that perhaps needs clarification. Apart from the fact that the term “inspiration” is rather worn out and imprecise, it is more important to understand that Belma Bešlić Gal’s performance does not attempt to interpret, reinterpret or even comment on Mak Dizdar’s poetry, let alone argue with it. Her artistic approach is perhaps surprisingly simple and unpretentious.

Modernist interventions in space have always searched for references; they have explored, discovered or failed to find commonalities. Belma Bešlić wants us to really immerse ourselves in today’s world, especially in a place like Radimlja, creating an ultra-modern context that suits Mak Dizdar, who was himself a modernist author. For Belma, his work is an open book, and she is an artist of ambience – an articulate and self-aware artist – particularly important as she is an excellent composer. This alone is enough to convince us of her artistic idea that ambientity is one of the possible relevant paths to Mak Dizdar’s poetics. Belma Bešlić simply has the talent to penetrate the unconscious and the dreamlike and to find places of kinship with Mak Dizdar’s poetics. Therefore, her Mak Dizdar – or Mak in her performance – is not loud, not shouting (as it used to be with Vojin Komadina and Jan Beran), but is reduced to a soft whisper or even murmur – almost silence – which, as shown in Radimlja, is a very meaningful idea.

As an artist belonging to the wave beyond postmodernism, Belma Bešlić and her collaborators have created an effective visual, almost spectacular suburban concept as a natural context for Mak Dizdar’s poetry. This allows the audience to easily bypass the rational barrier (beyond the mind) and find their way to the mysterious layers of “Stone Sleeper”.

The artist does not overdo it with her artistic skills and erudition; instead, she tries to gather the audience around her minimalist concept and a few authentic emotions that are extremely important to her. Thus, she succeeds with remarkable ease in involving the audience because she is not typical or conventional: she wants to hear what Mak’s poetry is telling us in this context. This collaborative artistic experience is crucial because the viewer/listener can collect or produce their own artistic experience – my associations “floated” from Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno to Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars, Eleni Karaindrou and other famous ECM artists. In the meantime, someone else probably had many other associations with Radimlja, perhaps unknown to me, which is also important, because in an open form everyone is invited to help create something important and artistic. This is possible because Belma Bešlić Gal is the type of artist who opens up content instead of closing it off, who stimulates instead of interpreting, who suggests instead of explaining.

Hope and consolation

Mak Dizdar, of course, never had the opportunity to hear of Laurie Anderson or Arvo Pärt, but Belma Bešlić is here to artistically see, connect and unite such different yet related aesthetic experiences and create a new artistic world that is neither harmless nor frightening. It does not frighten or torment the viewer or listener, but offers a space to roam, to gather, to enjoy, but also for their insecurities and fears, much as such a modernist concept can still allow (or open up) today. The artist Bešlić does not want to speak on our behalf or create her own private program; she lets us speak, gathered around an artistic minimalism that sails towards the dreamlike, the irrational in a way that is not provocative and pretentious, but fundamentally bold and direct.

Belma wants us to talk to ourselves at Radimlja about our lives – about our (co-)existence with technology and (new) imagination and our artistic experiences, especially at Radimlja, which for her is inextricably linked to the poetics of Mak. This is why this artistic concept can work so well in Radimlja’s work, because it opens it up to the viewer to think about how they manage their lives, if only for a moment (or as long as Belma’s performance lasts), before they pick up their cell phone and look or listen to something else entirely. Belma Bešlić offers no hope or consolation, of course; she even sidesteps some obvious questions, because her main aim, as we’ve already said, is to invite the audience to confront themselves and their experiences in a very particular place. And she succeeds, perhaps more and better than she herself had hoped.