Ars Kozara

Ars Kozara was an Art in Nature experimental workshop that was taking place on the Kozara Mountain in the historic homonymous National Park near Prijedor from 2007 to 2015. Every year in Fall we invited artists to spend  two weeks on Kozara and create artworks that would be respectful of the local flora and fauna. In doing so we were following the postulates of Art in Nature – a loose art movement started in the 80s that found its biggest representation in the Arte Sella open air gallery in Italy. The artists of Art in Nature wanted to distance themselves from other contemporary art practices in natural environment by respecting the nature and not imposing their art to it and even damaging it. In other words, unlike Land Art for example, the artists of Art in Nature only create objects of arts or make artistic interventions in nature that are reversible – with time the nature takes them back into its cycles and confirms its dominance. The status of art as a sellable art object is non-existent but unlike other processual art practices or arte povera, the nature is the first and the final place where this art is to be contemplated. 

The Ars Kozara project was initiated in collaboration with the Arte Sella from Italy but soon the respective practices  took different paths. The artistic interventions taking place on Kozara were more ephemeral, more processual and theoretical while the Arte Sella grew to become more alienated from the original Art in Nature postulates. 

I established the project in 2007 together with my colleagues from Tac.ka associations and coordinated it until 2012.