Anti-war, anti-exploitation, anti-dumbing... Banksy in Belgrade

On the networks and on billboards, before the New Year, a notice appeared that from January 1 to April 6, 2025, it is possible to see an exhibition of Banksy's works at Dečanska 8.

The media also informed us that it is a "Pop-up" gallery, but a gallery with such a name does not exist - it is a type of gallery created ad hoc to serve only for a certain period for a short-term purpose. You just need to find a space, get the owner's permission, have an artist who is willing to have his works or activities displayed there and visitors to pop in (in English).

What we know about Banksy
Most people who have traveled to European capitals or looked at artistic or ideological content on the Internet have an idea of ​​the graffiti signed by Banksy: a girl releasing a red balloon in the shape of a heart, a peddler shoving garbage under the drapery drawn on the wall, rats holding banners with provocative content. . Who exactly Banksy is is largely unknown. Someone surely knows that, but not the general public, not even the narrow public. It seems that this is a person of British citizenship, well-educated and gifted in the arts, possibly wealthy, given the type of activity and legal protection. Street art works signed "Banksy" began to appear in 1990 as part of the graffiti of the Bristol DryBreadz Crew, which means that the so-called artist (or artist, what not, although probably not, still) is between 45 and 50 years old today.

Two hours like forty minutes

Fumbling through what Google Maps says for Dečanska 8, which is a failed and rather horribly-urban broken, plastered, torn, scratched, dirty and mostly abandoned area of ​​the former shopping center in Čumićevo sokačet, one has an excellent introduction to Banksy art.

When I finally entered the building on the corner of Terazijski Tunnel and Dečanska, right next to the "Stanković" music school, the idea of ​​the person who set up the exhibition really hit me, and my sense of time was so messed up that I thought I had visited three levels of the exhibition space. only about forty minutes, and it turned out that I spent more than two hours there.

A kind, unpretentious Slovenian apologized for offering to guide a group of visitors, even though he is not a curator, to which I unpretentiously replied that it seems to me that such guidance is more banksy than it would be with a curator. Be that as it may, the curator will be appointed in a few days, it was promised, and she will be a doctor of historical and artistic sciences.

The non-curator told us how complicated it was to collect the exhibits and how among them there are almost no English works by Banksy because Slovenia is in the EU and England is not. To that, I noticed that in that sense, we should have cooperated with those of us who are also not in the EU, and the non-curator seriously replied that he hoped that we would not be, because it is not appropriate to be in the EU.

What's in the exhibition?

It was interesting and strangely informative and uninformative at the same time. We heard that the exhibition was prepared for ten years, that it was designed by David Rjazantsev, the owner of the Bled gallery Deva Puri (Deva - divine being in Hindi, puri - city in Sanskrit, maybe it makes sense when interpreting, maybe not, we were not told that, I was thinking).

We saw how Banksy went over the producers of The Simpsons and made them an animated film in which you can see all the misery of those who make T-shirts, dolls, and other items for gift shops related to the popular cartoon heroes (some of it can be googled: How This Became The DARKEST Simpsons Intro Ever), and even Paris Hilton did not fare better in wanting to collaborate with the controversial art cynic. We saw works related to the hypocrisy of the British royal family, religion, police, politics, graffiti painted in Kiev at the beginning of the horrors there during the Maidan, works from the walls in Gaza where Banksy built a hotel with, it is said, "the worst view in the world". , works related to the refugee crisis and the terrible deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, works dealing with environmental problems, global warming, world economic horror, human greed or cowardice, information manipulation and the entertainment industry.

From exhibit to exhibit, there is occasionally a dialogue between Banksy and other artists such as Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Warhol, Basquiat. We understood that Banksy thinks that since the cave of Altamira it is okay to paint on walls, especially those ruined by wars or neglect, and especially if the street artist achieves a high aesthetic and political or social activist level with his work.

A serious impression on the visitor of this exhibition can also be made by playing with the cameras that are everywhere, and by twisting Warhol's thesis that every man will have fifteen minutes of fame (from a time when fame was desirable) into Banksy's thesis that everyone will have fifteen minutes of anonymity today when public exposure is inevitable and pernicious in various ways.

Does it matter who Banksy is?

Tickets can be bought online, or at the entrance to Dečanska 8. They are not too cheap (1350 dinars, ie 950 for students, pupils and pensioners), but it is contemporary art par excellence, which speaks about all the important things of the world in with which we live, and that in its specifically cruel, but unwaveringly humanistic, even humorous way.

Who is Banksy, who is Banksy, does it matter?

"Copyright is for losers," Banksy declared in his book Wall and peace, and I imagined him for a moment - God forbid what Vladislava thinks! – as a victim of the Jackal from Ronan Bennett's latest (not particularly good) British TV series The Day of the Jackal.

There, namely, one can see how big global capital hires the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) to kill a multibillionaire who decided to stop it from happening again and, with his project on the transparency of capital flows, force the entire system to lose part of its wealth, in favor of greater social and economic equality. Take care, Banksy!