An Artist Who Cannot Network Is No Artist (d'apres Mladen Stilinovic), 2015
flag (acrylic on artificial silk), 150 x 250 cm
"In their works, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan provide equally profound and pointed commentary on the present-day circumstances in the art field: from updating reference works of art history, like Mladen Stilinovic’s flag, to the development of a special software that equates algorithmic computation with speculative thinking [...] Production conditions in the art business are always put in perspective with geopolitical and macroeconomic power structures. A pink flag with painted-on letters reading „AN ARTIST WHO CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH IS NO ARTIST“ of 1992 is one of the most referenced works of Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinovic. In it, he combines the authoritarian tone of Socialist propaganda with the homespun aesthetics of a self-made protest banner. The dominance of the West in the art world with its power of definition, institutions, and media is met with cynical denouncement. Almost a quarter of a century later, the artist couple Benera and Estefan found, in view of changing working conditions in the field of art, it was time for an update of Stlinovic’s legendary dictum. Meanwhile, it is no longer speaking English as a lingua franca that is key to success in the art scene; rather, Benera and Estefan identify, in An Artist Who Cannot Network is No Artist, networking as the key competence required of contemporary artmakers". [...]
(Verena Gamper, excerpt from the catalog of the exhibition REMASTERED. THE ART OF APPROPRIATION, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, 2018)
flag (acrylic on artificial silk), 150 x 250 cm
"In their works, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan provide equally profound and pointed commentary on the present-day circumstances in the art field: from updating reference works of art history, like Mladen Stilinovic’s flag, to the development of a special software that equates algorithmic computation with speculative thinking [...] Production conditions in the art business are always put in perspective with geopolitical and macroeconomic power structures. A pink flag with painted-on letters reading „AN ARTIST WHO CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH IS NO ARTIST“ of 1992 is one of the most referenced works of Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinovic. In it, he combines the authoritarian tone of Socialist propaganda with the homespun aesthetics of a self-made protest banner. The dominance of the West in the art world with its power of definition, institutions, and media is met with cynical denouncement. Almost a quarter of a century later, the artist couple Benera and Estefan found, in view of changing working conditions in the field of art, it was time for an update of Stlinovic’s legendary dictum. Meanwhile, it is no longer speaking English as a lingua franca that is key to success in the art scene; rather, Benera and Estefan identify, in An Artist Who Cannot Network is No Artist, networking as the key competence required of contemporary artmakers". [...]
(Verena Gamper, excerpt from the catalog of the exhibition REMASTERED. THE ART OF APPROPRIATION, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, 2018)