Fragments Untitled #2
single-channel video projection
6’10”
edition: 1/5
2014
Using the sequences of one of Yugoslavia’s most popular TV series, A Better Life, the work Fragments Untitled #2, reveals images that testify to the accelerated political and economic changes in Yugoslavia during the 1980s and in the early 1990s.
Fragments Untitled is a series of works dealing with the politics of media images that participated in creating the historical narratives of Yugoslavia in the period of 1980-2000.
At the 55th October Salon, Disappearing Things, two works from the series, Fragments Untitled #1 and Fragments Untitled #2, were exhibited.
A Better Life is a Yugoslav TV series, produced by Television Belgrade, which achieved tremendous ratings in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This 82-episode series with elements of soap opera, comedy and drama, premiered between 1987 and 1991, is considered the most popular series in the former Yugoslavia.
The character of Ema, one of the main protagonists, torn between petty bourgeois and socialist values, illustrates the problem of a value-system mismatch in a society sliding towards destruction. By summarizing the first forty episodes in six minutes, the effect of anticipation of something terrible and unknown that is inevitably coming is created.
The Fragments Untitled Project analyses, deconstructs and appropriates media images to indicate the operation of media machinery and manipulation it produces. The films are realized through the method of deconstruction of the existing archive material.
This series of works recreates the context of media content, highlighting what was previously invisible and suppressed, what remained marginalized or considered ephemeral in the media stream.
From the catalogue of the 55th October Salon
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-166/1.6.2016.
Inventory No. 1425
Photo: still from the video work
Selected Bibliography:
55th October Salon, Disappearing Things. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2014
The 6th Cairo Video Festival, Nov. 8 – 20, 2014, Catalogue, Medrar for Contemporary Art / Gezira Art Center / Zawya Cinema, Cairo, Egypt, 2014
Neimenovani fragmenti [Fragments Untitled], Dec. 23, 2014 – Jan. 12, 2015, texts by Aneta Stojnić, Nikola Dedić, Exhibition Catalogue, Youth Centre Gallery, Belgrade, 2015
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Doplgenger is an artist duo – Isidora Ilić (1978, Belgrade, Serbia) and Boško Prostran (1979, Belgrade, Serbia). Doplgenger’s work deals with the relation between art and politics through exploring the regimes of moving images and modes of its reception. They deconstruct the film medium, language, structure, and text in order to discover the ways in which art/moving images participate in creating political reality. They rely on the traditions of experimental film and video and, with some of the procedures in those traditions, intervene on the existing media products. Doplgenger’s work has been presented in Serbia and abroad, at solo and group exhibitions and at film and video festivals around the world. More information at http://www.doplgenger.org