It’s been some time since the installation of Alban Muja’s Svi Žele Pogled (Everyone Wants a View) on top of the former Solidarnost skyscraper building. The sign, in grey, is perhaps a more subtle, ambient public intervention from the Kosovan installation artist, than other recent works, such as Enough is Enough (Tirana, 2021) or Never Say Never (Pristina, 2022). Both these latter works have their origin in recent Kosovan history, and seek to disrupt or alter people’s perceptions of public space as a means of encouraging them to think about the message in these sculptural installations. Svi Žele Pogled, meanwhile, is more open-ended, and less anchored to specific interpretations of place or of historical narrative.  

A passer-by may take some time to notice Muja’s installation, at all. The font of the letters is similar to those used for long defunct state-owned companies from Yugoslav times; someone not looking carefully might mistake the sign for a relic of Energoinvest or Jugopetrol. But a closer look can surprise even the most jaded and locally familiar citizen, and invites a response to the proposition “Everyone Wants a View”.  

The presentation of the work in these letters, on top of a famous socialist era building, unsettles through ambiguity; is this the ghost of a brand, a readymade real or imagined, the name of a forgotten company, a deliberate intervention into what’s left of public space? What does “Everyone” even mean, in our current moment of algorithmically-driven hyper individualism, deriving in part from the hyper-capitalisation of media space? It is perhaps important to state, in this context, that the work itself derived from a period of research and discussion of how this particular locality in Bihać came to be, and what the current residents of the skyscraper thought of the wording, and the broader project. 

From the time of Lawrence Weiner’s text-based sculptures and installations in the late 1960s, text in art has been used to encourage response, interaction and counterpoint; Weiner’s imagery franchised the construction of the meaning of the artwork to each viewer or “receiver” who saw it; his words would connote a particular image in each individual’s head, according to their own experiences and knowledge. Muja’s approach is more open ended, not descriptive but intimating follow-up questions: A View of What? Who are we thinking of when we say Everyone?, thus generating different answers from each viewer. 

The context of the development of these two artistic practices is divided not only by time but also by context. Whereas Weiner’s text-based practice, developing from the end of the 1960s, took place in specific public or gallery contexts, in a time of retreat from “grand narratives” and an interest in self-actuation and whimsy associated with a nascent postmodernism, Muja’s intervention, nearly sixty years later, comes at a time when intelligence and consciousness are de-coupling.

AI, robotics, discontents and uncertainties of post-digital life are growing at a speed alternatively frightening and dislocating. Many are only content with an intensely narcissistic view, disconnected from geographical context, mediated by screens and apps. Increasingly incapable of living outwith the mesh of technology, such viewers find it challenging to simply enjoy the moment, and using nature as a means of slowing down, in an attempt to find an elusive inner peace.

However there is a very specific local context mapping onto a crisis that will affect all of us in the decades ahead; the climate emergency, and how to tackle it collectively, as a species. In the context of Bihać, and wider Bosnia-Herzegovina, this debate is polarised as private self-interest versus a more nebulous “common good”; the gap between a political desire to ensure proper governance of the river and its surrounding ecosystem, and the difficulty of enforcing that desire, on behalf of citizens, in practice.

In this sense Svi Žele Pogled is an invitation for people to stop and take a position in this debate. Is the complex and challenged natural environment of a river, and the surrounding town and nature that depends upon it, something simply to be monetised without regard to the consequences, or a space regulated and cared for to the benefit of all. In present day Bosnia-Herzegovina, “the commons” appear as more shards of the shattered mirror of the socialist past, existing in the symbols and (some of) the behavioural conventions of the past but over-written by the atomising and alienating processes of late capitalism. The gap between late socialist subjectivities, and the indifferent neoliberal subject of the early 2020s, is opened out painfully by this work. Everyone Wants a View, but few have the agency to buy or claim one – even temporarily, or the luxury of time to dally long in looking at it, should they be lucky enough to have a vantage point.  

There’s also the symbolic association of rivers and waterways with the character of an area itself. When I lived full time in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I can well remember the anxiety caused by remedial works to the waterfall at Jajce; for some months an engineering company worked on re-routing the waterfall slightly, and strengthening the riverbed. This recurring character in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s story, as it was altered, caused great concern; every day citizens would watch for hours as the workmen methodically completed their tasks, with all the anxiety of someone awaiting the results of difficult surgery on a loved one; the waterfall seen as emblematic of the state of the country itself.  

Similarly, the polluted brown waters of the River Bosna around Zenica and the pungent odours of chemical pollution that one often senses when walking along its route, are an easy metaphor for the difficult century experienced thus far, socially, culturally and economically. If “everyone wants a view” of waterways, many citizens prefer to retreat into their imaginations or personal history, conceiving of these environmental commons in their ideal state, and refusing to engage with their present reality. If citizens have felt a lack of agency and transparency in the way these rivers are (mis) managed on a daily basis, they have sought to claim that agency for themselves in high profile campaigns against ruinous hydroelectric dam projects for Bosnian rivers, with varying successes.

The battle between the right of individual citizens to dignity of life, a well-managed environment and good health, set against the desire of multinational corporations to extract resource and profit from that environment, is playing out across the territories of the former Yugoslavia that is still not part of the European Union; a battle that has spanned anti-mining campaigns, protests at the vampiric asset stripping of former state owned enterprises, to the over-development of Ohrid, a world heritage site in south-western North Macedonia. These are power struggles that balance laws drafted in the interests of the many, against laws set aside in the interests of the very few. 

The broad contours of these tensions in our time are well documented and regularly top of local and regional news. What role, then, can an institution such as KRAK play in these debates, and in facilitating the clever and subtle interventions of artists such as Alban Muja? 

Having visited KRAK for the first time last November, I was able to discern that it plays this role in four delicately inter-linked ways. Set in the context of the former Kombitekst textile kombinat, it is a significant step in trying to reclaim some sense of the commons after socialism. This is not an ideological re-building, but a social one; providing a high quality, contemporary space where people can meet to discuss art or simply meet up and be together with art in the background. I was struck immediately by the open-ness of the space, where people were not artificially divided according to age, class or particular interests, but mixed together with others whom they would never normally encounter on a daily basis. KRAK’s work is an on-going negotiation; how should the emptied spaces of socialism be shaped and owned in our contemporary Actually Existing Dystopia?  

Negotiation is also a space for contemplation and slowness. Contemporary art demands that you slow down, and think; many practices from thirty or forty years ago now struggle to be heard and understood in an era of collapsing attention spans and swipe-right. It is still possible to think through the subtleties of work but only in an atmosphere where everyone feels welcomed, and feels as though their opinions will be heard, whether based on deep knowledge of art, or not. There is an important distinction to be made here, to be engaged in the production of culture, as opposed to the passive consumption of it. These processes demand time to be meaningful, and require a conversation unmediated by technology, the use of social skills that we are in danger of forgetting. Contemporary art and its problematics have the chance to live on through these meaningful invitations to conversation and friendship. 

Of course when we speak of the commons we are not just speaking of Bihać, the Una and environs, but of networks of affinity and influence. KRAK reminded me quite strongly of Kulturni Centar Tekstil in Štip, formerly, like KRAK, a workers’ social club from Yugoslav times that had fallen into ruin. Re-opened in 2016 as a site of art-activism, the centre was subsequently passed on by Filip Jovanovski and Ivana Vaseva who had organised its re-opening, to a group of workers and activists who re-animated the centre as a social space, a place where skills and knowledge could be acquired, and as a space of cultural encounter.  

KRAK is also reminiscent of para-institutions in the Scottish context such as Workspace Dunfermline or the recently re-imagined Creative Aberdeen, which take as their starting point the audience, and their potential to engage with contemporary art and debate in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere; both organisations that have little patience with old hierarchies and see the potential of new relationships in every setting. They take delight in building an audience for art amongst those who would either never consider or feel intimidated by the prospect, of visiting institutional gallery spaces. A point of difference is that these two organisations prefer to self-fund, and build what they can from that, than approach public bodies for help in staging activities. 

KRAK’s own negotiation of the fine line between institutional behaviour, whilst not officially having the status of cultural institution or the long-term funding associated with it, is one of its clear strengths. Institutions in the Bosnian context are glacially slow things, decades in the making and able to challenge behaviours and change expectations only incrementally, if at all; para-institutions, which appear as non-hierarchical spaces shaped as much by their users as by the collective of people who help to run it, are much lither, and used to solving unexpected problems – everything from funding to infrastructure to logistics – in as pragmatic and effective a way as possible. Cultural institutions at the state level, since the traumatic dissolutions and ruptures of the former commons in the 1990s, have not felt the need to try and shape any public debate or to innovate, particularly. Para-institutions require constant engagement, innovation and audience interaction to maintain a purposeful momentum and with that, a valued place in the community.   

The provision of learning opportunity and skills acquisition in a cultural context where they are very difficult to acquire without informal social connections, is priceless. The centre’s development of abilities in events management, audience building, and hospitality are key markers for cultural institutions Europe-wide, as they attempt to maintain a share of the public funding that remains for the arts. The high-quality selection of publications and cultural magazine are further evidence of engaged, commonly-owned projects that can only make richer the local cultural ecology over time. 

Para-institutions – indeed any cultural formation in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian context, are as skilled as anywhere in Europe in producing high quality and impactful events from very precarious circumstances; of maximising the potential of the moment in the hope that the deep social and intellectual foundations of the enterprise will endure into the future. I have a firm belief that KRAK stands as an exemplar of what is possible in the development of the cultural infrastructure of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the future.  

Rooted in the community, open to people of different backgrounds, abilities and cultural hinterlands, using audience-building and skills development to enable users and managers to grow personally and professionally, and providing a locus for challenging, new and memorable experiences, KRAK seems certain to play a role not just locally and nationally but, very likely, internationally in the years to come. 

Bosnia and Herzegovina needs more KRAKS. We are beginning to see parallel models emerge in Gallery Manifesto in Sarajevo, with the two institutions building close working relations. How these cultural formations develop, which other cities will come forward to add to this emerging grass-roots networks, and what the longer-term consequences of this culture-in-common will be, will be fascinating to observe in the next few years. It may be counter-intuitive to be optimistic in the present very troubled historical moment, but Muja’s work and its facilitation here in Bihać show us that such optimism is not yet misplaced.