O3ONE Art Space was established in 2004 with the vision of presenting contemporary artistic practices that extend beyond the realms of art and culture, encompassing science, technology, and environmental sustainability. Through a wide array of art exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects it initiates, O3ONE responds to the challenges posed by new technologies and funding models to contemporary cultural production. By adopting an alternative approach to existing standard models, O3ONE provides a communicative platform through which artistic content becomes accessible to the broadest possible audience.
O3ONE is an independent, multimedia, interactive art project whose primary goal is to foster creativity and cultural diversity through innovative cultural productions. The project is driven by the principles of invention, communication, and innovation, continually developing its capacity to embrace the new and the different.
O3ONE strives to showcase the contemporary art scene, to bring new meaning and value to local artistic production, and to contribute to the exchange and enhancement of ideas and information with art centers worldwide. By positioning contemporary art and culture within diverse social groups, this project facilitates greater understanding and engagement with a wider audience, where both cultural practitioners and the public, through open dialogue, form an inseparable whole.
Over the past 20 years, O3ONE has hosted more than 2,500 exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and promotional events.
The O3ONE project is inspired by the fact that today, more than ever, art breaks conventions, emerges and „travels“ faster and more easily, becoming more accessible to the 21st-century individual—yet often remains difficult to comprehend.
O3ONE’s mission is to demystify creative expression and to demonstrate that contemporary art defies traditional formats, can originate anywhere, and recognizes no boundaries in terms of medium or audience.
O3ONE’s vision is to contribute to the ongoing cultural and creative evolution by engaging creative industry professionals in addressing a wide range of important societal needs in the broadest possible context.
We live in an epoch which is characterized by the contamination of all categories, by changing one field with another, almost a kind of confusion of genres, in a country in which politics is not about politics any longer, but spoils all the other fields of life, economy, science, art, sports. When politics is everything, then nothing is politics any more, and that is the reason for the absence of faith that something could be done, the absence of faith that it is worth trying, that giving up any engagement by which responsibility for one’s own destiny could be taken up.
With definite domination of populistic trend, which is in the first place manifested by the support of banal ideology as general good, the enlighted Serbia, in other respects being moved towards the borders of our reality, seems to be defending its honor despite the evil spirit of transition, enthusiastically working on its own artistic and cultural projects, indicating the worthlessness of the stated rival concept.
Insisting on the thesis that Serbia is incorrigibly divided into two separate realities – one European, cultivated, decent and civilized, and another, primitive, populistic and unenlightened, in a word – Balkanic, numerous cultural delegates just as some political leaders, having the best possible intention to set the question of modern and responsible cultural policy, are inclined to resort to inquisition strategy, recommending some kind of forceful abolition of mafia-turbo-porn-folk codes that have, during more than a decade, built media and cultural scene of Serbia.
However, the best way to perform symbolic and real interruption into the ruling paradigm, is the strategy of so-called “cultural guerrilla”, which, instead of criticism and “cold water inventing”, offers to the domestic public a quality, positive, different, in a word ”proactive“concept.
And that is exactly what Nebojsa Babic did, offering to Belgrade and Serbia a diverse, exuberant and thoughtful programme of O3ONE. Without any government’s obligatory appendage, without leaning on the donation practice that the state otherwise provides for its institutions, Nebojsa Babic, with O3ONE, set out a completely new model of engagement in culture.
Obviously regarding culture not as a declarative project of state policy, but as an individual act of responsibility of artists and culture creators, in the world which is deprived of all great value systems, Nebojsa Babic has explicitly shown how to, by personal engagement, by creative ideas and investing into future, turn one’s own enthusiasm into a certain cultural precedent.
Instead of declaratively opening a verbalized front and by doing that, to shoot another shot in vain, O3ONE has, during the twenty years of its existence, in a thoughtful and unpretentious way, presented numerous artists and organized various lectures, workshops and seminars in the fields of art, modern design and architecture, establishing itself as a kind of private and alternative Cultural City Centre.
Providing a new and non-institutional communicative space, O3ONE, with its projects, profiled a cultural ”counterattack”, demonstrating to the domestic public in the best possible way that, on a par with the aesthetics of fair spectacle, porn codes and ”magnificent” nonsense, there is a universe in which the messages are exchanged spontaneously, unpretentiously and in a witty way.
As a certain guerrilla intervention paradigm in a ruling cultural monolith, O3ONE became a cultural phenomenon par excellence, being one of the best ways to turn the audience into participants instead of the passive spectators, to really mobilize it, and by doing that to make communication in culture interactive. That is because cultural guerrilla has no need to explain anything, let alone to criticise. Its job is to offer a real alternative.
Zorica Tomić, PhD (Culturology)
Light
Change that we are building
Blokaduu
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