Cindy Blazevic
November 30 – December 11, 2011
Opening: Friday, December 2, 7 pm
GALLERY 1313 Main Gallery
1313 Queen Street West,
Toronto, ON M6K 1K8
T: 416 – 536-6778
E mail: director@g1313.org
www.gallery13131.org
Hours: Wed – Sun 1- 6
Step aside flags, anthems, invented traditions and overworked symbols of identity, you who were cultivated as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, but whose negative assertions of nationalism bore so much responsibility for the havoc of the 1990s. In this new post-war order, the shared heritage of rebuilding and the efforts to join the EU — perceived symbol of civilization, modernity and wealth—have become the new pan-Balkan identity, binding and tethering society, complete with its own culture and insignia. 
Pascal Paquette
Grey Area is a collection of post-war documentary photography and painting that examines a less celebrated part of Europe, the Western Balkans, with its intermediate position, its historical and political complexities, and its perpetual status of limbo – a past unsympathetic to easy analysis or clear verdicts and a future wavering uncertainly between EU membership and minor nation-statehood.
Grey Area is an exhibition about the collective post-war experiences, symbols and culture in the Western Balkans. The show is an offshoot of and footnote to the artists’ archive project, The Culture Lobby, which took place in the Western Balkans 2008-2010.