Flu_ID is the annual exhibition in Dom omladine Gallery in Belgrade that was initiated in 2001 with an aim to present significant students’ works in the field of new media.

The exhibition is a part of Flu_ID intermedia workshop at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade which responds to students’ art practices that can not be easily positioned within traditional domains of fine art education. Aiming to critically combine art, theory and science/technology, the project comprises alternative educational procedures, workshops and presentations. Its programme is dynamically modified according to the ongoing students’ projects in order to improve their competence but also in favour of their promotion and understanding of the language games that will enable them to extend their professional horizon and to merge their aesthetical and ethical experiences.

The ambition of presenting Flu_ID in Zagreb is twofold. On the one hand, this exhibition – to be attended by all of its authors – opens up prospect of creating a new communication space between artists of the youngest generation. On the other hand, Flu_ID is actually a very interesting project-model, worthy of presentation in milieus other than its own, especially Croatian.

The project in question is an exhibition by the students from a class of Dragan V. Jovanović, Dejan Grba and Zoran Todorović who are presently founding Department for Intermedia Studies. This department should complement operative capacities of the Faculty of Fine Arts through including different artistic, scientific-technological and theoretical-philosophical problems into students’ creation. The department is also meant to provide students with multidisciplinary support in project realization, to offer an interactive programme and varying educational-operational models combining education, production and promotion. This concept has evolved from a need to react at the issue of complexity and divergence of contemporary art, which evades a concept of fixed educational programme.

The Flu_ID project was the first serious and concrete ‘product’ preceding the actual reform of the study. In comparison to the standard annual exhibitions or marketable events where art products are packed into classes, in a sense of quality representation of the certain departments, Flu_ID – by its serious attitude – competes with the most interesting group exhibitions in the city.

The youngest artists equally use traditional and new media, which characterizes the exhibition at hand as having interdisciplinary or ‘intermedia’ nature. Selection of media depends on a content of the artworks and does not serve as demonstration of a technical skill (the artists do not demonstrate skill of handling video camera, while the other departments’ students prove skill of clay modelling or painting oil on canvas.) Media is incorporated, in-depth, into the artwork’ content. The content of these works is very fresh, provocative, communicative and demand visitor’s openness. We hope you’ll be taken by them.

Flu_ID exhibition catalogue, Container, Zagreb 2004.