We are pleased to announce „Foreigners Are People Who Can See Spirits”, featuring the Vienna-based, Yugoslavia-born artist Dejan Kaludjerović, who already participated in several of Memphis’ past projects and will show new works in this upcoming solo exhibition. Dejan Kaludjerović was born and studied visual art in Belgrade. For his achievements in visual arts, he was granted an honourable Austrian citizenship. In 2017, he co-founded the Viennese art and culture organization Verein K – Kunst, Kultur, Kommunikation.

In his work, Dejan Kaludjerović explores the conjunction between consumerism and childhood, to analyze identity formation and the stability of representational forms. Most of his paintings, drawings, objects, videos and installations, employ the processes of recycling, copying and re-enacting, thus creating patterns that simulate mechanical reproduction, and criticize homogeneity embedded in popular culture.

The exhibition „Foreigners Are People Who Can See Spirits” focuses on works recently created in the context of the comprehensive work complex „Conversations“, a long-term and multi-layered research-based project initiated by the artist in 2013, the results of which have been successively exhibited in various formats such as multimedia installations, videos and drawings. The starting point of the project are interviews with children between the ages of six and nine from different socioeconomic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds that Kaludjerović conducted between 2013 and 2017 during artist residencies in Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, Israel, Iran, Slovenia, Austria and Serbia. Consisting of a set of rather simple questions, these interviews were then presented in several exhibitions in their respective context as sound installations, usually accompanied by sculptures that replicated games. At first glance, what we hear in „the format of an unusual sociological research, one with apparently no direct or pragmatic results” (Seamus Kelly), seem to be merely naive, sometimes absurdly funny and occasionally astonishingly mature and profound answers and comments to more or less harmless questions. But, of course, „if we take children 100% seriously, we learn something not only about them but about the society they grow up in as well and the adults they will one day become. Perhaps we may also attempt an inversion: if children are already adults, then, in a certain sense, adults may also be said to still be children. In any case, it ought to be possible to create an artful dialogue between adults and children as well.” (Klaus Speidel)

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Dejan Kaludjerović