{"id":7357,"date":"2025-11-16T15:02:53","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T14:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edi-typ-24154.stage.sites.vh3-schrittweiter.de\/ausstellungen\/shadow-citizens\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T10:27:22","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T09:27:22","slug":"zelimir-zilnik-shadow-citizens","status":"publish","type":"exhibition","link":"https:\/\/edi-typ-24154.stage.sites.vh3-schrittweiter.de\/en\/exhibitions\/zelimir-zilnik-shadow-citizens\/","title":{"rendered":"Shadow Citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shadow Citizens<\/em> offers an insight into the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker \u017delimir \u017dilnik (b. 1942, based in Novi Sad, Serbia) within the exhibition context. From his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, \u017dilnik has gone on to make more than fifty films, including a number of feature films and TV productions, often in the genre of docudrama. He received international recognition early on, winning the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1969 Berlin International Film Festival for Early Works<\/em>. In the 1970s his films encountered political opposition, and he left Yugoslavia for West Germany, where he realized several independent films, including some of the earliest films dealing with the topic of guest workers. In the 1980s, after leaving West Germany\u2014due to his films once again facing political opposition and censorship\u2014and returning to Yugoslavia, he made numerous TV and feature films through which he portrayed early symptoms of the country\u2019s growing social conflicts, continuing in the 1990s with films dealing with the maladies of the post-socialist transition as well as questions of migration.<\/p>\n

Many of \u017dilnik\u2019s films have prophetically announced real-world events that mirror topics tackled in his work, such as the dissolution of Yugoslavia, economic transition from socialism to a neoliberal order, the annihilation of workers\u2019 rights, and wider social erosion related to labor and migration. The exhibition\u2019s title, Shadow Citizens<\/em>, reflects \u017dilnik\u2019s lifelong focus on invisible, suppressed, and under- and misrepresented members of society. As a concept, \u201cshadow citizens\u201d is related to a form of political engagement toward \u201camateur politics\u201d\u2014the imaginative and subversive non-normative knowledge and alternative sensibilities that always lie dormant in a society and occasionally visibly push back against \u201cpolitics as usual.\u201d According to urban theorist Andy Merrifield, amateur and professional politics are in fact \u201cpolitical divisions that can be reclaimed and moved\u201d like tectonic plates. Courageous amateurism is prominent in \u017dilnik\u2019s films, both as a concept and as a method, and the exhibition elaborates on different facets of the potentials of shadow citizens as well as the pressures of the amateur undercurrent in emancipatory politics and artistic production.<\/p>\n

The exhibition, which spans five decades of \u017dilnik\u2019s career, revolves around several of his feature-length films, which anchor numerous short films and excerpts from longer works. These are organized in clusters of interconnected themes that run through \u017dilnik\u2019s opus and relate to the concept of shadow citizens, such as questions of shadow economies, borders, migration, labor, terrorism, revolutionary fatigue, clashes of parallel modernisms, and more. While elaborating on structural features that \u017dilnik early on recognized as crucial for social transformation and that shed light on contemporary social and political urgencies, each of the exhibition\u2019s clusters also looks into \u017dilnik\u2019s particular method of filmmaking in different production contexts, as well as into the evolving relations to protagonists of his films, many of whom appear in more than one work. The relations to and among his protagonists are at the center of Among the People: Life and Acting <\/em>(2018), a new work commissioned for the exhibition that gathers many of them together years later to talk about \u017dilnik\u2019s films and their impact on individual and collective lives.<\/p>\n

The notion of shadow citizens, conceived as different minorities that are increasingly becoming majorities everywhere, runs through \u017dilnik\u2019s oeuvre, where it is taken up as a possibility to imagine a new concept of citizenship that pushes current limits and borders.<\/p>\n

As part of the exhibition, more than 20 of \u017dilnik\u2019s films will be available for online viewing here<\/a>. Many of these are rarely screened, and all are being made available online to this extent for the first time. The films trace various periods and different working conditions within \u017dilnik\u2019s practice. They are organized in five sections, each available for viewing during the exhibition for a limited period of time. The first online screening program will start 22 April 2018, and further screening dates will be announced on the website. Initially launched in 2009 on the occasion of the project For an Idea \u2013 Against the Status Quo<\/em> organized by Kuda.org and extensively updated for this exhibition, the website is also a precious resource of writing on \u017dilnik\u2019s work by many critics and colleagues.<\/p>\n

The opening weekend film program (20\u201321 April 2018) at the cinema cine k<\/em> will have \u017delimir \u017dilnik in attendance.<\/p>\n

Shadow Citizens<\/em> was shown in Galerija Nova<\/a>, Zagreb, in 2018 and in 2020 in Kunsthalle Wien<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Curated by WHW (What, How & for Whom): Ivet \u0106urlin, Ana Devi\u0107, Nata\u0161a Ili\u0107, and Sabina Sabolovi\u0107.<\/p>\n

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