Milica Tomic

Milica Tomic
XY the reconstruction of the crime
XY the reconstruction of the crime
1996/7, 2 channel DVD installation, C, sound, 13’57”, loop
The theme of this work is about the crime of absolute forgetting of the killing of the demonstrators,ethnic Albanians, citizens of the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On March 28th 1989 they protested against the abolishment of the political subjectivity guaranteed to them by
the existing Federal constitution.The work deals with the impossibility of solving the confrontation of the minority and the majority apartheid.
In other words – the inner contradictions of the communities based on the economy of sacrifice. XY ungelöst in the media of contemporary art
detects the beginning of the escalation of the uncontrolled violence in SFRJ in the end of the ‘80s, which ended in a dark dismemberment and
ethnic cannibalism.
Branimir Stojanovic
I am Milica Tomic
I am Milica Tomic
1999, video installation C, sound, 9’58”, loop
This video analyzes and reflects the paradoxes of the act of stating the statement, which attaches the individual to the ethnic collectiveness. This
work detects at the same time the absolute contingence and the retroactive necessity of belonging to a fictional reality of ethnic collectiveness.
I mag(in)ing identities
“Every community is an imaginary one, but only imaginary communities are real”, says a quotation from Etienne Balibar, which opens a web-site
with Milica’s work entitled I am Milica Tomic (1998/9). This work, actually a series of works in different media, particularly explores theoretical
consequences of identification. In all versions of this work, everything evolves around Milaca’s appearance and the series of statements she
pronounces (in the video) or are written across her face on her web-sites. The statements proceed in the following pattern: “I am Milica Tomic,
I am Korean”, “I am Milica Tomic, I am Norwegian”, and so forth. Initially, one can observe that every sentence contains a true and a false
statement: yes, that is Milica Tomic, but she is neither Korean nor Norwegian, nor Austrian for that matter. What is explored here is the very
formation, the very making of an identity. It is now almost commonly accepted that linguistic experience governs our “inner structure’, that this
structure maps linguistic conceptualizings. Therefore, to state, to pronounce one’s identity makes one’s identity. We acquire personal identity
by acquiring the name, and it is significant here that Milica Tomic does not dispute that form of identity in all its arbitrariness. On the other
hand she problematizes the making of an ethnic or national identity, which she sees also as an arbitrary declaration. Also, this identity does not
belong to any category of “feeling”, which is usually a way to exceed one’s original/inscribed ethnic identity by saying “I may be Korean if I feel
as a Korean, even if I am originally Serbian”. On the contrary, she has rejected any ethnic feeling and explores the whole issue as a rhetorical
formation. In other words, to paraphrase Laclau and Zac, every identification is constitutively incomplete and will have to be always re-created
through new identification acts. By amounting identification acts to arbitrary declarations she is creating an identity through agglomeration of
declared identities, i.e. creating an imaginary community out of her primary narcissistic identification, in so far as “community always exists
through the imaging of the group of which one conceives oneself a member”. Therefore, in Milica’s work different identities are not projected
upon herself but her image is projected upon these identities, she is not making some kind of a ‘new age’ statement about her participation
in a harmonious ideal of the global community of nations but aiming at the very split
within an act of identification, and the very agglomeration of identities as a hysterical
symptom. In one and the same process this work questions both paranoiac spaces
of particular national identities (leading to xenophobia, discrimination, violence) and
hysterical spaces of new globalization (representational overexcitation that turns the
world into image). However, what has been here overlooked so far, is the very action
which occurs when one of her statements is spoken or spread over the screen: at all
these instances a different bleeding wound appears linking the act of identification
with assertion of a lack at the root of any identity. “If the subject is originary and
ineradicable lack, any identification will have to represent, as well, the lack itself”.
In psychoanalytic theory, original lack is represented by castration anxiety, and the
woman’s sex is constructed as a lack: instead of a penis there is a cut, a wound.
Every identification act attempts to mask that lack but it constantly reaffirms it. This is
certainly the case with the only identity of Milica Tomic that both her and the viewers
of her work take for granted, that is the identity of a woman. In effect, the place of
this work within the feminist debates is pivotal for the dilemma whether to retain and
identify with attributes of one’s biological self (which incorporates a sense of loss)
or just to assert that these attributes gain their meaning only through patriarchal
organization of the society.
Yvonne Volkart
Portrait of my Mother
Portrait of my Mother
1999, 5 channel video/slide installation C, sound, 64’
This slide and video installation is an attempt to reconstruct, i.e. to analyze, a very intimate conversation between the author and her mother
by subjectively filming the way from her to her mother’s home. In just one 64-minute sequence, separating the unity of the tone and the sound,
being on the way through Belgrade streets this intimate conversation between Milica and her mother speaks also of the breakdown, the defeat
of the modernist politics, and it reveals the neuralgic points of the newborn rightist female discourse.
Erlauf erinnert sich...
Erlauf erinnert sich...
2000 Installation, public space, Erlauf, Austria 10 billboards 2 x 3m / 2 billboards 9 x 4m
The historical touch of two forces the Soviet and the American in May 1945 happened in Erlauf, a small Austrian village. Disposing the inhabitants of Erlauf between the American and the Soviet soldier, represented by a monument of a Russian traditional sculptor Oleg Komov made
in social-realistic tradition, and asking them to enter into this symbolical space, as political space par excellence, means to decide if it was
then in 1945, and it is now in today’s Austria, a space of anti-fascist subjectivization, or otherwise, was it a triumph over fascism or defeat and
occupation.
Belgrade remembers…
Belgrade remembers…
Neither Oblivion nor Memory, 2001, performance / magazine Prestup, Belgrade
In 2001, a typical post-socialist glossy lifestyle magazine Prestup invited me to be photographed for its October issue cover. I staged a photo of
myself with title Belgrade Remembers (2001) on the Belgrade Terazije Square, hanging from a lamppost. At the very place in August 16, 1941,
German Nazi troops hanged at Terazije Square, in the center of Belgrade, the first anti-fascist movement activists, five members of the NOP2
for sabotage and an attack on the German army personnel - who were never later, after the war commemorated by a monument.
The re-enactment of that event, hanging at the Terazije Square, would be an act of establishing continuity with the People’s Liberation Struggle
– an anti-fascist liberation movement in the territory of Yugoslavia during the Second World War. It is dedicated to the re-discovering of the
emancipating politics of socialism. Today’s simplification of the history of socialism and the reduction of the entire corps of socialist modernism to totalitarianism erases and pushes into oblivion the emancipatory politics of socialism. By reducing socialism to totalitarianism annuls the
politics of anti-colonialism and antifascism, gender equality, industrial democracy, and introduces instead politics which negate the outcome of
the Second World War, anti-fascist movement.
When I decided to appear in the October issue of the Prestup magazine as one of these five hanged anti-fascist, my attempt was to investigate
the ways in which we can engage with the past to confront the
drives to forget, and in this case to evoke the emancipating
potential of the People’s Liberation Struggle and the role of
the women in it, by confronting it with today’s politics of historical revisionism and restoration, which redefine the outcome
of the Second World War in Europe. By inhabiting and appropriated the dying woman’s perspective, the gaze of the dying
patriot through a time loop, eye-toeye with us today, in October
2001 was established.
“2001 is the time when all ex-Yugoslav nations built nationally-pure separate states, when Yugoslavia dissipated due the
in ethnic wars, and all renounced heritage of the anti-fascist
resistance since it was closely linked to the communist past that
the new regimes wanted to forget. Tomic invokes it purposely,
in an act of resistance to collective amnesia. It can only be
read as a critical comment on uncritical forgetfulness and ethical numbness of her fellow citizens.” (Jelena Stokic)
I have produced two different photos for the magazine, a
cover and inside photo: “Tomic’s seductive outfit can also be
interpreted as a critique of the highly polished fashion photographs published in the same magazine of which she is on
the cover. While her beauty can lure the viewer, the directed
gaze of a hung woman and the second, the inside magazine photo will most probably deny pleasure. Tomic chose to
speak from the position of the wound, from the “blind spot”
of the dead. (Jelena Stokic)
Milica Tomic
Remembering
Remembering
2000/2001
performance / photo installation, 2 c-prints
This performance is one of the projects from the series “Remembering,” which started in Erlauf in 2000. I am dressed like a member of the
Partisan movement stepping “between the two armies” two bronze soldiers representing the American and the Soviet army. Stepping “between
the two armies” would be an act of establishing continuity with the People’s Liberation Struggle – an anti-fascist liberation movement in the
territory of Yugoslavia during the Second World War. It is dedicated to the rediscovering of the emancipating politics of socialism. Today’s
simplification of the history of socialism and the reduction of the entire corps of socialist modernism to totalitarianism erases and pushes into
oblivion the emancipatory politics of socialism. By reducing socialism to totalitarianism annuls the politics of anti-colonialism and anti-fascism,
gender equality, industrial democracy, and introduces instead politics which negate the outcome of the Second World War, anti-fascist movement.
I reminded to the emancipating potential of the People’s Liberation Struggle by confronting it with today’s politics of restoration, which redefine
the outcome of the Second World War in Europe.
Milica Tomic and Roza El-Hassan
Driving in the Porsche and Thinking About Overpopulation
Milica Tomic and Roza El-Hassan Driving in the Porsche and Thinking About Overpopulation
2000, billboard 3 x 9m
Billboard project on the façade, Secession, Vienna, Austria. In February 2000 the
Vienna Secession, started a project that gathers artistic statements by Austrian as
well as international artists commenting the political situation in Austria. For this
project we used a press photograph which attracted much attention in Austria,
it was used in billboard posters advertising the Austrian weekly magazine Profil:
Wolfgang Schüssel as the passenger sitting side by side with Jörg Haider, who is in
the driver’s seat of a Porsche. It was exposed on the billboards all over the city as
a black and white photo. We used the original color photograph, but we changed
the passengers.Who are the once that are excluded from the representation of a
political power, and how do they appear in a space made just for two?
exTension
exTension
2002, Kunst am Bau / Dominique Perrault, flip-sign print built-into the wall, 126 x 152 cm, Rathaus, Innsbruck, Austria
Innsbruck was given a new town hall in 2002. Architect Dominik Pero integrated his new building into the existing town hall, and was also
commissioned to remodel it’s interior. This work deals with the history of the town hall, the opening of the building in 1939. Two photos have
been superimposed by means of DIFO flip image technology. Through movement or different angles of vision juxtaposition is achieved, a
juxtaposition between two significant moment in the history of the building, the completion of the new town hall 2002 and the opening of the
1939 building. Two images of the Parliament are merged into a flip-sign effect technique, built into the wall. Observers can see either image
depending on their angle of vision. Passer-bys can meet the historical/political issue of this building’s history.
national pavilion
national pavilion
2003, light-heads, color, Yugoslav pavilion in Venice
On the existing façade, 400 flashbulb lights are set on regular intervals and on suitable distance. Flashes are interconnected with power cables.
Every minute the flashes go on. Synchronic dazzles form a coherent light curtain, and for a moment the object/pavilion disappears in the light.
Consequently, the dazzle of the flashes causes ”damage” in the scopic field in the place where it is registered. This temporary blindness lasts
until the eye recovers.
During this respite interval, while the eye is recuperating, new energy is being accumulated which then
allows flashes to go on once again, and thus again cause the sightlessness in a scopic field. This prevents the eye from seeing the object/
pavilion. In other words, for the viewer and his eye, the pavilion is constantly invisible.
The following text from three political declaration in the language of the original documents is written on the approaching steps to the entrance
of the pavilion: Second meeting of AVNOJ (Antifascist Council of National liberation of Yugoslavia), 1943, Decree no.3: “On the basis of each
people right to elf-determination, including the separation or unification with other peoples, and in accordance with the true will of all peoples of
Yugoslavia, confirmed during the threeyear joint struggle for the liberation of people, that has forged unbreakable brotherhood of the peoples
of Yugoslavia, Antifascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia decrees the following...”
Jugoslavia/National Pavilion Of Serbia (Venice)
On Love Afterwards
On Love Afterwards
2003, DVD Installation C, sound, 10’, loop
On Love Afterwards presents interviews with four partisans, members of the Peoples Liberation Movement during WWII in Yugoslavia. In a
subtle way, the artist dissolves the documentary format by making certain statements into recitatives and refrains. On Love Afterwards is an
artistic text with political impact, because it transforms individual experiences into a collective epos.
Susann Wintsch
Reading Capital
Reading Capital
Sometimes the class struggle is the struggle of an image against another image and one sound against another sound
2004, DVD installation, screening wall, text and t-shirts, C, sound, 10’, loop
Prominent and respectable San Antonio/Texas citizens, who also represent the American society, globally the most developed capitalist system,
were asked to read passages from Karl Marx’s Capital. The project Reading Capital refers to Eisenstein’s conception of a screen adaptation of
Marx’s Capital. However, this project is positioned from the perspective of the contemporary world where capitalism has triumphed by stretching beyond frontiers.
Reading Capital
Sometimes the class struggle is the struggle of an image against another image and one sound against another sound 2004,
photo serial, 60X60cm (in this photo baby Honor Johnson)
Alone
Alone
2001, double-sided DVD installation 2 channel projection, C, sound, 20’, loop
Two projections present two sides of the local, Serbian, public fe/male representation: famous female folk-singer (turbo folk star) on one side
and three anonymous men playing card-game on the other. This male type of community is never represented in media, reflecting the way in
which the dominant power is reproduced on the micro social level. The singer is never present in their community as a real person; she exists
only in the media. Media constructed female body is a man’s phantasm construction, in which a female body is the surface, screen with a double
function. For a safely distanced male’s gaze it is at the same time a battlefield of globalization expansion as well as the very last point of defense
from globalization.
Turbo-folk is unique popular music genre which is a mixture of 'Oriental' and 'Western' influences, similar both to the North African Rai and the
modern techno-dance music. Invented in Serbia and spread all around former Yugoslavia, the turbo folk genre is symptomatic for changes on
the global scene, and at the same time authentic and original contribution to the globalization process. In other words, turbo-folk has paved a
way for globalization to enter isolated and excluded Serbia. Although at a first glance turbo-folk appears to be a local phenomenon, it is in fact
closely linked to globally important regional events and developments during the last two decades.
Appeared at the beginning of the 90-ties, and particularly developed during the war in the former Yugoslavia, turbo folk is the music genre
that continues to be popular all over the post-Yugoslav region and wider. This phenomenon, which was used as one of the successful means
of the war propaganda in the recent past, today represents a controvert model of the integrative culture which connects the people divided
by national borders and new identity clusters at this part of Europe. This music genre empowered by high developed postproduction (by new
technologies and new media tools) generated a specific form of the turbo folk culture that mostly attract the younger generations - grown
and born during the war. On the other hand, the abjection of this genre among local art, academic and cultural elites in the former Yugoslavia
usually identifies the turbo folk as a low, tasteless, postindustrial, mass cultural trend and its performers and fans (turbo folk population) as
intoxicated other.
This is Contemporary Art
This is Contemporary Art
2001, performance / Dragana Mirkovic, 20’, du bist die welt, Wiener Festwochen
This is Contemporary Art performance consists of a stage appearance of a singer Dragana Mirkovic, Serbian turbo-folk super star.
This event was staged in the central exhibition space of the international contemporary art exhibition. It was organized as an installation. In fact,
a new version of the ready made artistic practice, in this case the object was an industrial object of the pop culture.
The subject of the show, which is the strategies of the globalization, as well as my choice to confront the strategies of globalization segregation
in many ways explains the artistic choices that I made. The way through which global enters local is always one-way and inherently exclusive. My
intervention, the dislocation one, functioned on two levels: the dislocation of local genre to the international scene, which opens that one-way
street for a passage in both directions, and the dislocation of the pop culture in the field of the contemporary art.
The minority population of more than 250.000 Ex-Yugoslav citizens lives and works in Vienna. They are completely invisible for the general
Austrian public. They are excluded and they exclude themselves. But, appearance of Dragana Mirkovic as a part of the contemporary art show,
in an art institution, was a breakthrough that worked both ways. For the first time this minority population was invited and made visible in the
Austrian public space and for the first time contemporary art made the breach into the social field of this minority group.
Turbo-folk is unique popular music genre which is a mixture of 'Oriental' and 'Western' influences, similar both to the North African Rai and the
modern techno-dance music. Invented in Serbia and spread all around former Yugoslavia, the turbo folk genre is symptomatic for changes on
the global scene, and at the same time authentic and original contribution to the globalization process. In other words, turbo-folk has paved a
way for globalization to enter isolated and excluded Serbia. Although at a first glance turbo-folk appears to be a local phenomenon, it is in fact
closely linked to globally important regional events and developments during the last two decades.
X X X/ Triple X
X X X/ Triple X
2002, DVD installation
C, sound, 143 min
This work is about mass production of pirated, illegal copies of Hollywood Blockbusters. These copies exist in China, Asia, Africa, South and
North America, as well as Europe. It is a global phenomenon. This work, is a pirated appropriation and technological mutation of a Hollywood
blockbuster Triple X. Sometimes it was the only way we could see the world’s cinematography, but it also provided something that other countries
from the so called “centre” couldn’t enjoy: the chance to watch the latest films before their official premiere and without any censorship. While
this provides a way for the excluded to participate, it also illuminates how those who are.
Container
Kangaroo hunter Stuart Taylor shooting with a hunting rifle, Mount Victoria, NSW Blue Mountains
Container
Milica Tomic, 2004-2011
Container is the object of globalization par excellence. The utilitarian symbol of international trade and commerce has been transformed into
a sealed mass coffin. Containers are used to transport goods globally, and they circulate/travel around the world. This project is an attempt of
reconstruction through an object that remembers. In this project container enters into this process of (re)construction of the crime and exits
as the object which remembers, the object which embodies the images that are intentionally withheld from the collective memory.
Container as a performative object is based on a war crime. The object is created anew for every exhibition. In reconstructing the hole-riddled
container, production conditions specific to each location are inscribed in the work. Thus far the work has been realized multiple times: in
Belgrade in 2004, for the Sydney Biennial 2006, and for the 6th Gyumri International Biennial in Armenia in 2008
Container project is a (re)constructed crime, based on the crime that happened in North Afghanistan when thousands Taliban prisoners of war
were killed during the American invasion. Taliban fighters, who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance following the Battle of Kunduz, were
loaded by the hundreds into the sealed truck containers near Fort Qaala
Zeini. Without any air to breathe or water to drink, they were transported through the desert on the two-to-three-day trip to Sheberghan Prison.
In the scorching heat, and fearing suffocation, the prisoners gasped for air and screamed for water. And they promptly received an answer to
their pleas from the soldiers, who cynically riddled the container with bullet holes for ventilation, in the process deliberately killing many of those
within. Not a single image of this crime appeared in the media! So we assume that there is no direct visual trace of this crime.
This reconstruction is about an event that is a symptom of politics of the permanent war against terrorism. Simultaneously, I view these events
as a symptom of the regime change of what we used to call war. The war used to be defined as a continuation of politics by other means and
it was in the function of politics. That moment when the war against terrorism was declared it was an act that has changed the concept of
war. This new type of war introduced specific mechanisms of criminalization and it also redefined particular ethnic groups, states and religious
groups outside of the law. We stepped into the era of a permanent war, with an open question: Who is being terrorized and who is the terrorist?
MY INITIAL INTENTION WAS TO PRODUCE THE NON-EXISTING IMAGE. In order to achieve “a non-existing photography” I started process of
reconstruction of a massacre over Taliban’s, to make holes in the container by using the real weapons.
Through the reconstruction of Afghanistan crimes, we managed to construct a space in which the intricacies of “new” relationships became
visible. As well as the role of institutions, individuals and facilities that we encountered in the process of reconstruction and the simulation of
conditions under which the crime was executed and thus discover new signifiers mechanisms criminalization of power and meaning reveals a
strategy of permanent war in each local context.
The fact that we have reconstructed the crime in the new settings, not only did it build the network of military, economic and political relations
which are in the position to reconstruct the crime that took place in Afganistan, but what became visibly real but subdued and unresolved during
these reconstructions were the networks of military, economic and political relations, which during the process of reconstruction appeared
active and begun to tell us its own criminal story (Australia/Sydney, Serbia/Belgrade, Armenia/Guymri). Each time different networks of war
machinery specific to each country became visible. Reenactment of this reconstruction, that is the conditions of shooting into the container,
in different countries and states produced different scenarios. During the reconstruction of this crime it is the state which defines under which
conditions it is possible to perforate the container and this is the moment where this artwork takes place. The act of reconstruction of this crime
could be conceived as a litmus paper - litmus is a water-soluble mixture of different dyes. The resulting piece of paper or solution is used to
test materials for acidity. This artwork, the reconstruction tests relations, and constructs, actually makes visible military, economic and political
network of relations which produce violence and points at the ways in which the local network participates in a global politics of war.
Through this reconstruction the project Container aim of reconstructing those politics responsible for negating, denying, erasing and hiding in
the process was able to reveal all the material networks of the politics of war, violence and human rights. It further shows how the actuality of
exhibiting and the process that leads to exhibiting in a specific context becomes a crime of that specific community.
Display
1.
As Performative Object
2.
Unpacking the content of the reconstruction of the crime, analyzing the process and objects that appear and are specific to the
reconstruction on each site. This content includes all documentation (objects, visual, audio, writings) of the process as well as “biographies”
of the objects which are used and that appear during the process of the reconstruction. These biographies are tracing life histories of these
objects, in other words, their genesis, their usages, maintenance through specifically created method as archival work, questioners, interviews
etc. Trough exhibiting newly build relationships that are becoming visible, construct a completely new “container”.
Xe Services LLC still usually referred to as “Blackwater”, is a private military company founded as Blackwater USA in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al
Clark. Blackwater has a wide array of business divisions, subsidiaries, and spin-off corporations but the organization as a whole has courted
much controversy. “Blackwater”, company is still under contract with the State Department and some Xe personnel were working legally in Iraq
at least until September 2009.
Shooters at the sports club ‘Policemen’ firing with automatic weapons at a container, Belgrade 2004.
Container (outside), Gyumri, Armenia, 2008
Container (inside), Gyumri, Armenia, 2008
Kangaroo hunter Stuart Taylor shooting with a hunting rifle, Mount Victoria, NSW Blue Mountains
Container as reading room, Cargo (exhibition), 2009, Berlin
“Blakewater” services, 2008
Kangaroo hunters Stuart Taylor together with the artist during the (re)construction process on a private shooting range, Mount Victoria, NSW Blue Mountains, Australia 2006.
Educating Capital
Beatrix Ruf, Kunsthalle Basel, 2006
Sønke Gau and Katharina Schlieben, Curatorial Team, Shedhalle, Zurich
Educating Capital
video interviews archive
Series of the video interviews with the protagonists of the Art system and the contemporary art system/market in Zurich (Switzerland),
Belgrade (Serbia), Helsinki (Finland) and Prishtina (Kosovo) that reveal three differing contemporary art system/market situations.
Eva Presenhuber, Gallery Eva Presenhuber since 2000, Zürich
J.P. Hoby, President of Culture Department, Zurich
Susanna Kulli, Gallery Susanna Kulli
Jacqueline Burchardt, Editor and founder of Parkett magazin
Esther Eppstein, message salon, artist space
Jean–Claude Freymond–Guth and Andrea Thal, Les Complices, artists space
Heike Munder, Director/curator of the Migros Museum in Zurich since 2001
Meta Kenworthy, Gallery Ausstellungsraum25
Miodrag Krkobabic, Artist
Nebojša Milikic, worker in culture
Uroš DJuric, artist, Belgrade, 2005
Danica Prodanovic Jovovic, Director KCB
Educating Capital Zurich
485 min/11DVDs, 2005/2010
Paradigmatic contemporary art market, Zurich scene is generally the most developed model of the “corporate” system of the art.
Educating Capital Belgrade
video installation 37min, 2005/2007
Belgrade scene is represented through the talks with its participants that are lacking local contemporary art market, art system and state
subsidies. They are trying to think and to picture the boundaries of the market and the system that do not exist.
Educating Capital Helsinki
with Eemil Karila, Krister Grahn, Paola Tella, Jaako Karhunen, Tuulia Susiaho, Axel Straschnoy and Olli Keranen 2 DVDs, 70min, 2007
Helsinki situation (researched in collaboration with the students of the Helsinki Fine Art Academy students, participants in the project “Unknown
society”) is characteristic by its lack of the developed contemporary art market and by existence of the state organized contemporary art
system.
From Socialism to Capitalism and than Back
From Socialism to Capitalism and than Back
Milica Tomic/Sasa Markovic, 2007, video performance 20min
It was conceived and filmed by Milica Tomic and Sasa Markovic-Mikrob performs and reflects ontransformations and mutations of his artistic
production, practice, art market, art system in a relation to the changes in social and political system, from socialist to capitalist one. With all
emotional and thinking paradoxes + controversies it produces.
Fundation
Foundation
In April 2001 on the initiative of Milica Tomic and Roza El-Hassan the Foundation was founded.
The mission is to support young contemporary art and cultural exchanges, with the focus on regional collaboration. Roza El-Hassan researched
and supported works and projects that are initiated or implemented in Belgrade and Serbia; Milica Tomic supports multi-regional projects and
Hungarian art. All projects will be finally realized in cooperation on a common platform.
October 2001 the first event was held in Ljubljana. It is a group exhibition of young art from Ljubljana, shown in the gallery SKUC. The
Foundation commissioned a curator, who selected the participating artists, and a second panel of renowned local art-critics, who are the jury
for a (money) price awards.
The curator, who is responsible, is Barney, a 12-year-old dog, a Pitbull. He spent three days at the Fine Art Academy in Ljubljana, and selected
seven artists/students. One of the artists refused to participate in the exhibition, but he agreed that his critique, which refers to the selection
of the Foundation, in the form of video interview, will be shown at the exhibition. The exhibition can be visited for three weeks.
The second project of the Foundation is a discussion evening in Budapest in an independent space of the city, which is organized by two artists
Andras Galik and Balint Havas (Little Warsaw).
Discussion about an artwork
Discussion about an artwork
2001 / 2009
Discussion About an Artwork is an ongoing project formed as a discussion group consisting of artists, students, theoreticians, curators, writers... This project in 2001 with the aim to generate an informal community that would regulary meet and actively elaborate the current tendencies and the phenomena on the local art scene. (Little Warsaw). An important issue was to question the difference between the institutional
discourse in art and informal thinking, as well as how the social and political conditions reflect in the works and the regional contemporary art
scene in general. Despite of the informal character of the sessions and ever changing number of the participants, the project succeeded in
mobilizing a consistent group fully engaged in invention of a specific approach to the reflection on art practices.
Monument=Discussion
Monument=Discussion
2002-2010, Grupa Spomenik, lecture/performance
Between 2002 and 2006, the discussion group Discussion about Artwork has actively commented on the competitions for the “Monument dedicated to wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia” by Belgrade City Municipality. The group has also discussed the ideological trajectory of the
changes of the title of the monument, in parallel with the changes of the state ideology in the field of public memory, which followed the serial
of unsuccessful competition. These changes were actually indicative for the impossibility of the naming of the monument. Each new competition
generated the new discussions on key issues connected to the impossibility to name and build such a monument, but also the very discussions
generated conflicts among the participants, which resulted in the splits inside the group Discussion about Artwork and its dissipation.
The group called Monument was formed as the result of this splits and differentiations. Through the political differentiations inside the
Discussion about Artwork discussion group, where the whole debate started, as well as through conflicts with representatives of the State ideology, the Monument group persisted in the continuation of the public debate related to the issues, generated by competitions for the monument.
Monument group asks the question : Is it possible to produce a monument that is dedicated to the wars and dissolution of the Yugoslavia if its
dissolution disputes the very context of the State that proclaims itself to be the keeper of the historical continuity and memory? Is it possible
for the State to represent imperial wars, refugees, terrorized civilians and genocide on the citizens of the states that seceded from Yugoslavia
without any insight into its own responsibility for these tragic events?
Monument group develops strategies, in the field of art, for production of the autonomous space for discussion in which it would be possible
to talk about events, ideology and politics of the former Yugoslavia in the 90s. In other words, it states that the discussion is the monument.
From 2008 Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group) is a Belgrade-Tuzla based New Yugoslav art/theory group active in the broadly conceived
fields of art practice and theory, developing strategies and generating a political space in which it would be possible to discuss the Yugoslav
wars of the 1990s and the existence of the (post)-war collectivities in the region. In this space we aim to produce a monument that will neither
follow the ossifying politics of monuments, nor the prevailing models of reconciliation. The monument in question is in the process of becoming—it consists of a collective in which each entity defines its own political position.
Politics of memory
Politics of memory
participative object/distributive monument
2007, Prague Biennale, Monument of Transformation, Prague Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) (Nebojsa Milikic, Milica Tomic and Branimir Stojanovic)
Grupa Spomenik exhibits an installation made out of “Politics of Memory” publications (bilingual edition, English and Czech).as a “participative object”, as to say “distributive monument”. In this way the publication which is a transcript of the (im)possibility of building a monument,
becomes a public discussion, stays in the hands of the viewer, and the exhibited installation in the form of the monument disappears.
Content:Publications of The Politics of Memory by the Grupa Spomenik are specific products that were made in a ‘no man’s land” between a
publication and distributive artifact. The content of these distributive publications are transcripts of conversations about the wars in the 1990’s
the form of which is a distributed object/artifact. The first conversation was lead between the members of the Monument group with each other.
By looking over all their decisions, thesis and failures they attempt to pin down the moment when the citizen initiative grew into political subject,
requiring new tactics in order to play a complex game of political distance from both the state and civil.
Politikat e kujtesës, Contemporary Art Centre Stacion, Pristine, Milice Tomic solo exhibition ‘Politics of memory’. Grupa Spomenik (Nebojsa
Milikic, Milica Tomic and Branimir Stojanovic) produces distributive monument made of distributive objects – publication with transcript of the
talk where group members talk about dynamics and politics of the discussion group under title Politics of Memory, bilingual edition, English and
Albanian.
Politike secanja (Politics of Memory, just in Serbian language), produced for the exhibition - 24.Nadezda Petrovic Memorial ‘Transformation
of Memory’. Politics of Image, Cacak, Serbia. Grupa Spomenik (Nebojsa Milikic, Milica Tomic and Branimir Stojanovic)The context of the
second conversation, lead between the Monument group, members of the TheMilitary Invalids’ Association, The Fighters of Wars Since 1990
Association and the Association ofParents of Soldiers Killed in NATO Bombing “Victims Support Group”, were the reasons and results of the
initiative for building a monument in Belgrade to the fallen fighters during the wars in the 1990s. The result of this double structure, publicationdistributed object is in its direct distribution of these transcripts without censorship.
Politics of Memory: Where the Genocide Was, Shall the Political Subject Be
Politics of Memory: Where the Genocide Was, Shall the Political Subject Be
2007, Video Discussion, 5 channels, sound,color, 150 min
Mathemes of Re-association
Mathemes of Re-association
2008, Lecture Room No.2, Newspaper editorial board With Grupa Spomenik (Damir Arsenijevic, Svebor Midzic, Darinka Pop-Mitic, Branimir Stojanovic, Milica Tomic)
27.09.- 4.10. International Art Exhibition 49. October Salon/ The Monument Group is establishing the Editorial Board of the newspaper
Mathemes of Reassociation.
After two months of work in the exhibition space, using the exhibition space as a production site, the Monument Group as editorial board
conceived and edited the newspaper Mathemes of Re-association, which informs about, and cover the effects of dislocation of the scene of
contemporary science and theory from Bosnia and Herzegovina, into Serbia, that is to say, the editorial board space will serve as an intermediary in the debates initiated by these two discourses within Serbia’s public and intellectual space.
In the center of the debates are the following concepts: missing persons, victims, mathemes, traumas, and testimonies — concepts that originated through the discourse of contemporary science and theory in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By dislocating of the scientific and theoretical
community from Bosnia and Herzegovina into Serbia, a space is being created for the discussion and collaboration with scholarly, administrative,
and theoretical community, and interested public in Serbia.
Politikat e kutjesës
Should I Stay or Should I Go
Should I Stay or Should I Go
Distributive installation, 2007 (together with Branimir Stojanovic)
More then hundred pair of shoes are placed in front of the Contemporary Art Platform exhibition space, an old warehouse in London’s Finsbury
Park from June to September 2007, as a part of the RECOGNISE, international exhibition. Eachmorning most of the shoes are missing. Every
day we replace each missing shoe with a new one.
It is an intervention in the construction of the absolute other of the present-day Europe, in this case one which is stigmatized as: Muslim, Islamic,
fundamentalist, terrorist etc. This way contemporary European relation (reaction) to a non-traditional European citizen puts us into the position of religious and ethnical. Our work intendsto avoid both present European politics to victimize the European citizen who isn’t traditionally
European, as well as to avoid the minority identity politics of this accused/pointed group.
Vedendosie
Familiy
Familiy
Film 2008-2010
Familiy deals with the strategies of reconstructing
the suppressed memory of two eras: the national
socialism of the mid-20th century and the ethnic
cleansing of the end of the 20th century. Both eras,
each in its own time, produced the politics of terror
and oblivion.
Family relies on the strategy of memory practised
by Petar Klajn (1950-1993), a historian of psychoanalysis, who, having found out about the founder
of psychoanalysis in Serbia Nikola Miklosz Šugar,
as evidenced by the total disappearance due the
consequence of the German and the local Serbian
national socialism, faced with a total erasure and
a lack of any written trace of him, as well as the
disappearance of almost entire Šugar’s family in the
concentration camps, resorted to a specific method
of recreating the visual identity of Nikola Šugar in
order to reconstruct any visual trace of him. Klajn
engaged the services of a professional draughtsman, who managed, on the basis of the recollections
of the only surviving member of Šugar’s family, his
sister, to create a portrait of Nikola Miklosz Šugar.
This creative act of producing a visual trace, which
opposes the politics of total annihilation, provided
the impetus for the project Family which takes place
in Srebrenica. Through communication with the
surviving members of the victims’ families, a visual trace of their beloved, killed and gone missing
during the genocide campaign, is created using the
medium of drawing, in the same manner that Klajn
used to obtain an image of Šugar.
Going through a process of communication, which
awakens memories of this trauma of destruction,
which is indirectly ours as well, we establish connection with “that which is not a part of our memory”,
which we try to bring back through a process of
reconstructing suppressed memories.
It is our intention to initiate a living memory of the
destruction of people, in the memory of us, the
living, and to reconstruct the policy of confidence
of the vanished universalism of the former common
state.
One day, instead of one night,
a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, if light cannot come otherwise
One day, instead of one night, a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, if light cannot come otherwise
(Oskar Davico – fragment of a poem)
Video action 2009
War used to be defined as a continuation of politics by other means. That moment when the war against terrorism was declared was an act that
changed the concept of war. This new type of war introduced specific mechanisms of criminalization and also redefined particular ethnic groups,
states, religious groups and political organizations outside the law. We stepped into the era of permanent war, with an open question: who is
being terrorized and who is the terrorist?
The shifting of the notion of war in the direction of permanent war places us in the centre of the above question and mobilizes us all irrespective
of whether we are in a direct wartime situation or not. This gives rise to the question: how do we position ourselves in relation to this state of
permanent mobilization? Mobilization forbids any use of weaponry whose outcome is not a division into the terrorist and the terrorized; that is
to say, this confirms that there is a general ban on the use of armed force unless it is for the purpose of antiterrorism or terrorism. Each act
of getting hold of a weapon that does not serve the purpose of war against terrorism is proclaimed to be a terrorist act. Is it possible to use
armed force that does not establish the above-mentioned division into the terrorist and the terrorized?
The politics of permanent war constitutes a revision of leftist politics in historical terms, equating leftist and right-wing movements and struggles, and in this light, in relation to permanent war, the Partisan movement, and of the politics that Yugoslav Partisans conducted in the course
of their antifascist revolutionary struggle, war against war – (for peace?), would be one of the policies of terror.
The video action One day, instead of one night, a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, if light cannot come otherwise represents an attempt at
establishing continuity with the politics of the People’s Liberation Struggle during World War Two through the act of mapping out the successful
actions that members of the People’s Liberation Movement carried out in Belgrade. It is an attempt to proceed from the position of a rebel,
assuming an active position, without referring to the position of a victim, moving from the position of a victim onto the streets, politically
distanced from the politics of terror and antiterror, without ressentiment,mwith a machine gun in hand, carrying it simply and necessarily, as if
it were a supermarket carrier bag or an umbrella.
I used creative geography, or artificial landscape, a film-editing method, a filmmaking technique invented by the early Russian avant-garde filmmaker Lev
Kuleshov in the 1920’s, where various locations, places and times all appear to
occur in one and the same place over a continuous period of time, referring to
these places as “places that remember”.
Within the framework of this action, I just walk through all those places where
successful actions of the People’s Liberation Movement were carried out in the
course of the war against fascism, during World War Two in Belgrade, creating a
new territory through the artificial landscape/creative geography editing method.
Creating a new territory through the method of creative geography, my character
also remains imprisoned in the editing loop of the actual video, unable to find a
way out, for this newly-created/old territory. This territory, even though it is made
up of emancipatory politics, decisions and actions, is imprisoned and occupied by
a new time, the era of permanent war. Therefore, a new politics is not to be found
yet, and that is why my character, even though she knows precisely where she is
going, still wanders and roams, remaining imprisoned within a framework given
long ago. But this character, even though she waits and wanders, knows what she
is looking for on the basis of previous experience: a new universalistic politics,
outside organizations, movements and groups, solitary, singular but international.
In video action “One Day…”, as a background sound we can hear interviews
with five Partisan fighters (members of the People’s Liberation Army – men and
women alike), that I conducted in 2003, and they spoke about their decision,
reasons, at that time, to take part in the people’s liberation and antifascist struggle in Yugoslavia during WWII. They speak about what antifascist struggle means
today, in other words, why it is of topical interest today.
One day, instead of one night, a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, if light cannot come otherwise
(Oskar Davico – from a poem)
photo action 2009
In the fall of 2009, for two months, every day, I was going trough the streets of Belgrade with the machinegun in my right hand, carrying it
simply, naturally and necessarily, in the same way I was carrying the supermarket carrier-bag in my left hand.Who has the right to produce
narration about a crime? The right to public discourse about any crime is always delegated to the state and international organisations that
proclaim some act to be a criminal offence initiate a process of investigation of the said act and create narratives pertaining to it. It is precisely
this right to narration that confirms and defines power, that is, the right over the citizens of a certain state. I have always wanted to know what
would be the outcome of a declaration that is the result of research and developing narration about a criminal act on the part of the victim,
that is, the possibility of the victim having the final word in the process of constructing narration that victimises him/her yet again through this
process; the right to step out of the position of the victim, who, in the role of a witness, is eventually merely transposed into the raw material
of the law. Why should any citizen not be entitled to this right, and why, in the name of this principle should I, as an artist, not exercise the right
to proclaiming, reflecting, textualising and designating crime?
One Day...
photo, 2009, c-print, 60x60cm
Pythagorean lecture
Pythagorean lecture
performance, 2009
The dynamics of the “Pythagorean lecture”, a specific form of transmission of knowledge, are determined by the physical positioning of the
lecturer. The lecturer stands behind a curtain so that, for the audience, his/her voice serves as the only accessible source of information and
representation.
The unperformable: Pythagorean lecture
performance, 2009, Grupa Spomenik (Damir Arsenijevic, Pavle Levi, Jasmina Husanovic, Branimir Stojanovic, Milica Tomic, guest Branislav Jakovljevic)
“Pythagorean lecture” is performing the newspaper, “Mathemes of Re-association”. In this newspaper the question is posed: What still remains
after the genocide in Srebrenica? Grupa Spomenik believes that the genocide is fully speakable, but that politics and critique of ideology are
the only proper languages in which it can be spoken. Grupa Spomenik intervenes in the established dynamics of administering the genocide: it
treats case numbers (assigned to the victims) as mathemes, in order to disrupt the holophrasing of science and the politics of terror, and to
maintain the openness of the gap, the rupture, that is constitutive of politics proper.
The dynamics of the “Pythagorean lecture”, a specific form of transmission of knowledge, are determined by the physical positioning of the
lecturer. The lecturer stands behind a curtain so that, for the audience, his/her voice serves as the only accessible source of information and
representation. Grupa Spomenik will seek to utilize the device of the “invisible lecturer” as a means of separating its discourse from everyday
representations and doxa—a device for ushering the problematic of genocide into the realm of factual and speakable abstraction. Mathemes
will thus be counterposed to mise-ne-scene, directness of abstract knowledge to the meanderings of representation.
Towards the Matheme of Genocide
Towards the Matheme of Genocide
Grupa Spomenik (Damir Arsenijevic, Ana Bezic, Jasmina Husanovic, Pavle Levi, Branimir Stojanovic, Milica Tomic i gost Branislav Jakovljevic)
Pythagorean construction and transfer of the matheme of genocide
What is a matheme of genocide?
Matheme is not to be confused with the identification case number. This contains the case number, but this is more than the case number itself.
Matheme talks about the whole network of intersubjective relationships surrounding the genocide in Srebrenica. Matheme is something that
manages to be transhistorical. It carries the truth of genocide.
Pythagorean construction and transfer of the matheme of genocide
Can we make a Matheme that is going to be understandable a hundred years from now? Without somebody having to go through all the historicization, and without somebody having even image or having to go through the first visits to the labs, visit to the ICMP. Can we have something,
that can be shown and used, but to witness to the particular politics and to transfer this knowledge, and to transfer a truth of genocide?
What came out of the Yugoslav wars? Nothing. These wars were a sheer act of negation.How do we articulate an affirmative, emancipatory
politics out of an enthropy-inducing negativity?
The dynamics of the “Pythagorean lecture”, a specific form of transmission of knowledge, are determined by the physical positioning of the
lecturer. The lecturer stands behind a curtain so that, for the audience, his/her voice serves as the only accessible source of information and
representation. Grupa Spomenik uses the device of the “invisible lecturer” as a means of separating its discourse from everyday representations and doxa—a device for ushering the network of politics around genocide into the realm of factual and speakable abstraction. Matheme
is counterposed to mis-en-scene, directness of abstract knowledge to the
meanderings of representation.
What still remains after the genocide in Srebrenica?
Thirteen years after the genocide in Srebrenica, it has become a complex
object constructed by science, religion, administration and management of
the trauma. Paradoxically, there is a coalition of the three methods when
handling the bodily remains of those executed. New identity is constructed for
the victim of genocide, one which radically erases the historical and political
event that is the genocide itself. By means of identification and statistics the
victim of the genocide is re-named as a missing person. The religious ritual
of burial commits another act of erasing—by islamicising all the victims of
genocide. Contemporary science and religion thus holophrases the politics
of terror which, in order to carry out the genocide in Srebrenica, first had
to construct the object of their collective hallucination, the ‘Muslim—Islamic
fundamentalist’, an object non-existent in pre-genocide society in BiH. This
politics of terror, a terror of abstraction over reality, attempted to destroy
Yugoslav Muslims completely. In other words, contemporary science, religion
and the administration of post-genocide trauma repeat and perpetuate the
politics of terror by other means. The very politics of terror which was and
is responsible for the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica. Grupa Spomenik
believes that the genocide is fully speakable, but that politics and critique of
ideology are the only proper languages in which it can be spoken. Through
matheme, Grupa Spomenik intervenes in the established dynamics of administering the genocide: it treats identification case numbers (assigned to the
victims) as mathemes, in order to disrupt the holophrasing of science and the
politics of terror, and to maintain the openness of the gap, the rupture, that is
constitutive of politics proper.
Matheme/Reading Performance
Matheme/Reading Performance
2010, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
Towards the Matheme of Genocide
Towards the Matheme of Genocide
lecture and discussion, video 120 min, 2009