“from today till tomorrow” – equivalent meaning in English would be “from hand to mouth”
for the exhibition Marginalije zajedničkog (The Marginalia of the Common), Kuslev’s house, Podgorica, 2022.
- installation
- collective reading sessions
- performance
“Adrian Lister is an entity constructed as Adriana Gvozdenović’s parallel artistic character in the West-European context. It was created by an automatic translation of the artist’s name in Google-translate and it has been developed as “a discourse on the construction of identity”. In the formal and legal sense, identity is indeed an axiom, its change being always a political act, even in the sphere of arts. Through collaborative artistic work in the European Union, Adrian Lister has been constructed in relation to the boundaries of the personal and the collective, tracing the correlations with the otherness/difference. Adrian is witnessing all the absurdity of an identity conditioned by a national affiliation, geographic position, historical experience and customs.
Adrian forms opinions and emotions by traveling outside the memory of the artist, as Mayakovski’s cloud, free from the frames, confines and norms – it is a cloud with a revolutionary power to act. While working in Belgium, Adriana had set up a business called “Adrian Lister”, which she was forced to shut down due to the fact that she could not obtain a residence permit. She is seeking exile in her homeland and now, for the first time, she is exhibiting Adrian Lister in front of the Montenegrin audience. In addition to the material evidence of Lister’s art practice in the European Union, which will be a part of The Marginalia of the Common, Adriana will also organize collective readings within the exhibition and, at the end, in the final performative segment, she will embody Adrian Lister in the Montenegrin context. Part of the title From today till tomorrow is a moment that captures a feature of the mentality characterized by lack of planning and acting: it is an idiom that expresses inconstancy and uncertainty of the immediate future.
Adrian Lister is dancing on the margins, working on the periphery, choosing unconventional spaces, and inducing interactions, solidarity and collectivity. I interpret Adrian as a contemporary constructionist within the newly formed networks of art and financial capital in the era of digital feudalism! Despite the current right political ideologies and identity policies that foster the idea that only European ethnic groups are entitled to Western territory and culture, Adrian stands as proof that there are no identities, only identifications, interests and orientations. Adrian is indeed an incarnated critique of identity politics, freed from the national, sexual, linguistic and emotional determinants.”
— Nela Gligorović (from the exhibition catalog)
The exhibition The Marginalia of the Common, curated by Nela Gligorović, was created as a gravitating segment of the book Zajednička čitaonica (editors Vladimir Arsenijević and Igor Štiks).
During the exhibition, as a performative intervention and as an activation of the installation From today till tomorrow: Who is Adrian Lister?, two collective reading sessions took place, inspired by the texts from this book.
