Shadow Citizens offers an insight into the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik (b. 1942, based in Novi Sad, Serbia) within the exhibition context. From his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Žilnik has gone on to make more than fifty films, including a number of feature films and TV productions, often in the genre of docudrama. He received international recognition early on, winning the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1969 Berlin International Film Festival for Early Works. In the 1970s his films encountered political opposition, and he left Yugoslavia for Germany, where he realized several independent films, including some of the earliest films dealing with the topic of guest workers. In the 1980s, after leaving Germany – due to his films once again facing political opposition and censorship – and returning to Yugoslavia, he made numerous TV and feature films through which he portrayed early symptoms of the country’s growing social conflicts, continuing in the 1990s with films dealing with the maladies of the post-socialist transition as well as questions of migration.
 
Many of Žilnik’s films have prophetically announced real-world events that mirror topics tackled in his work, such as the dissolution of Yugoslavia, economic transition from socialism to a neoliberal order, the annihilation of workers’ rights, and wider social erosion related to labor and migration. The exhibition’s title, Shadow Citizens, reflects Žilnik’s lifelong focus on invisible, suppressed, and under- and misrepresented members of society. As a concept, “shadow citizens” is related to a form of political engagement toward “amateur politics”—the imaginative and subversive non-normative knowledge and alternative sensibilities that always lie dormant in a society and occasionally visibly push back against “politics as usual.” According to urban theorist Andy Merrifield, amateur and professional politics are in fact “political divisions that can be reclaimed and moved” like tectonic plates. Courageous amateurism is prominent in Žilnik’s films, both as a concept and as a method, and the exhibition elaborates on different facets of the potentials of shadow citizens as well as the pressures of the amateur undercurrent in emancipatory politics and artistic production.

Foundation for Arts Initiatives 
The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation
City of Zagreb
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
HAVC
Kultura Nova Foundation