- Stevan Vuković, Marko Lulić: Yes, just like the whole of society the Belgrade art scene has experienced a series of traumas over the last two decades. Having to deal with these traumas has prevented an art life free of neuroses from developing in Belgrade.
The first major event was the collapse of state socialism. We always believed in Yugoslavia that if anybody could manage to achieve the transformation from a socialist to a market economy then it would be us. We were able to travel, information was not a problem and the few dissidents there were never had to deal with serious repression.
Certainly many of us were driven out of official positions but in Germany in the 1970s people were also barred from certain jobs for ideological reasons. The state apparatus in Yugoslavia used an ideology of modernism and ethical equality. The third path, the way between the other power blocks, which Tito's Yugoslavia had embarked upon, seemed to be a genuine option. It was traumatic to experience the collapse of this state that was aided by politicians who ensured that nationalist conflicts and the formation of nations were conducted by means of violent confrontation.
Then came the second major trauma: the decline of the relative level of prosperity, the impoverishment of the middle class and intellectuals in a war situation and an economy dominated by war. In addition there was the collapse of normal day-to-day life and of the institutions, which Milosevic' people seized control of, making them inaccessible to many people.
The result was a third trauma: having to explain to people on the street a standpoint, always having to define oneself in relation to the local situation before one could talk to them about ones work, for instance as an artist.

- One should not forget that the Yugoslav scene in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the most progressive in Europe. People such as Daniel Buren or Art & Language were guests in Belgrade before they visited Vienna, for example. We also show this fact in the exhibition. There was a dramatic change in the area of conceptual art. Tendencies of the Transavantguardia and performance art flourished there at an early stage. You could meet international colleagues in Belgrade, at the Biennale de Paris or at the Trigon exhibition in Graz. All of this was supported by state organisations, as were the student culture centres.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia we had to form ourselves anew. The old institutions were closed to the avant-garde. The view from outside generally focussed on a few initiatives that investigated the political situation in a critical manner. The artists therefore had to learn how to organize themselves. They had to first find their own language. They had to realize that the emergence of a market did not automatically mean that they would make a career and that curators from the West, who arrived suddenly, could also guarantee nothing. At first there was a great deal of disappointment.

- In the exhibition we attempt to trace the development of a scene. It operates with historic links to the central art figures of the 1960s and 1970s who, during and after the end of the Milosevic regime, became important transmission figures, such as Rasa Todosjevic. He later helped shape the formation of a young independent scene with his first shows in private spaces. The starting point was the same for both generations: after the years of upheaval they both had to start work again. The regime had not been directly repressive, but it had frustrated every attempt at local, alternative opinion-forming by simply not reacting, as it were.

- The "reconstruction" of the Belgrade scene to which our exhibition is devoted did not happen so much in the "centres of resistance " against the regime but rather through activating loose networks of contacts that young artists had established. For example: the media art initiative kuda. org from Novi Sad worked in an exemplary fashion. It viewed itself quite naturally as part of an internationally networked scene and did not focus on the special nature of its traumatic local experiences. Or groups from the area of graphic design, such as Skart, that today principally make art in public space and community work. And of course artists such as Milica Tomiç or Uro‰ uriç, whose work was always internationally focussed and directed. These artists understood how to work out ideas with powerful images (which openly exposed the constructed nature of identities) to counter the politics of national identity.

- Yes. The Inc. is a play with the two meanings of incorporated, the literal meaning and the economic one. The scene is on the way to becoming a completely normal metropolitan European art scene. In contrast to the years of crisis, in which artists often did not know how they should react to international enquiries, the flood of Balkan exhibitions in the last two years in Belgrade has allowed completely normal contact and communication structures to develop in the art scene and towards the outside. We hope that we have been able to present in the exhibition a picture of this process and of the environment it takes place in. Ultimately, there is lot of powerful work in Belgrade.
We have a second aim, which is that the show should not repeat any of the old Balkan clichés using buzzwords such as fragment, overflow, colourfulness, ethno-kitsch etc., but should instead be a modern art exhibition. This, after all, is what the Belgrade art scene has stood for since the 1960s: for modernity.