The series of exhibitions Your Country Doesn’t Exist is named after a work by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, a campaign that started in 2003 and was realised in various formats, in numerous languages and in different cities. The exhibitions gather artists whose works resonate with wider associative field of emotional, social and historical references to this layered claim with multiple meanings – Your Country Doesn’t Exist. They are taking place in Art Workshop Lazareti (Dubrovnik), Gallery Nova (Zagreb), Multimedia Cultural Centre (Split) and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Rijeka), all institutions struck by a harsh right wing turn that started in Croatia with the new government.
 
Your Country Doesn’t Exist could be understood as an indication that the country we want does not exist, perhaps because we simply do not believe in countries and their borders, and do not accept to identify with them more than we are legally obliged to. Or your country does not exist as a state, because it is under some kind of occupation, or it doesn’t exist any longer, or it exists as a new political system which makes it look unrecognizable. Or we refuse to identify – to claim as our own – any country which defines its membership via the right to citizenship, always based on some form of exclusion. Or is it that our discomfort is, perhaps, created by the fact that civil rights are attributed selectively considering the degree of affiliation with the state, where only the ownership of a passport grants the possibility of having all civil rights recognized? This is by no means a guaranteee that they will be respected, and that makes the state of civil and human rights, as political tendencies, economic politics, ideological deviations, or a million other possibilities, one of the possible reasons which can force you to deny that there is a country you call your own. The statement Your country does not exist can thus mean that we renounce our country, and because it has been placed in the public space through this exhibition, it is claimed here and now, but also exists in different languages and different places, and resonates differently.
 
The truth of this statement is founded on an obvious lie, because states exist and define what we consider a country or a state and differences in meaning between the word ‘country’ and ‘state’ in everyday usage refer more to the level of emotional engagement when we refer to country’s landscapes, people, language etc., or, on the other hand, to a state as a form of its organization. It is not thus true that the country does not exist, it obviusly does, even for those who belong to nonexistent country of refugees – the country which, based on information from UNHCR, with one refugee per 122 inhabitants, would be the 24^th largest country in the world today (1). There still exists a country, one they had to leave, or one where it is more difficult to settle. But the truth remains – their country does not exist.
 
Your Country Doesn’t Exist asks the question to whom it speaks, who are people and communities which it addresses, and through this process fantasizes and creates an imaginary transnational community or temporary collective not defined by borders or by affiliation to a nation. In that sense Your country does not exist is a call and an expression of a wish, imagining of potentiality of a community gathered around an idea of a country that we are wishing for, though it doesn’t (yet) exist. At the same time, counter-intuitive and multiple meaning of this claim as artistic campaign by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, as well as the very title of the exhibition, understands itself with a pinch of humour and not deadly serious, as a direct intervention into social reality. This of course does not mean that it excludes it in advance, or that it does not desire and encourage such side-effects.
WHW
 
(1) http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2015/6/558193896/worldwide-displacement-hits-all-time-high-war-persecution-increase.html
 
This exhibition is part of the joint project This Is Tomorrow. Back to Basics: Forms and Actions in the Future, realized with support from the European Union Programme Creative Europe.
 
The programme is supported by:
City Office for Culture, Education and Sports of the City of Zagreb
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
European Union Programme Creative Europe
Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs
Kultura Nova Foundation