collection-artist

With their black background, Double Noir drawings point to the aesthetics of noir films; the black background evokes the film or photographic negative, while by imprinting chalk, like by the action of light, the image is recorded on the dark surface. The drawings of frames are not direct and literal quotations taken from films. Despite the author’s realistic visual expression, his drawing is dominated by a gloomy, nightmarish atmosphere, confusing uncertainty, suspense, accompanied by dramatic contrasts and psychological tension, additionally emphasized by the minimalism of the space and ambient sound. Thematically, the Double Noir narrative develops around the legendary noir protagonist, the actor Humphrey Bogart.
Svetlana Montua, for the catalogue of the 56^th October Salon

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-312/12.12.2017.
Inventory No. 1501
Photo: Courtesy the artist

Selected Bibliography:
56^th October Salon, The Pleasure of Love. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2016

The installation Mandala and Cross / Farewell to Arms is part of the artist’s years-long project under the same name (Mandala and Cross), based primarily on researching, analysing and archiving of print media in real time. The connection between ornament and crime in this installation is set as a proposal for rethinking the aesthetic-political interaction characteristic of violence generated by ideologies, for rethinking what we recognize as strongly “branded” distortions, which now – through images of humanism and violence – have become an integral part of a universal process of “normalization”, which erases its conflicting origin.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-158/25.5.2016.
Inventory No. 1476
Photo: Courtesy the artist

Selected Bibliography:
Branislav Dimitrijević, “Zoran Naskovski: Mandala i krst / Zbogom oružje”, text for the exhibition, Nov. 25 – Dec. 1, 2014, Centre for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD), Belgrade, 2014, https://www.czkd.org/2014/11/follow-up-mandala-i-krst-zbogom-oruzje-zoran-naskovski/, accessed on Mar. 30, 2020
Branislav Dimitrijević, “Zoran Naskovski: Mandala i krst / Zbogom oružje”, BETON – kulturno propagandni komplet, No. 207, Year XIII, Belgrade, Tuesday, May 21, 2019, 4, https://www.elektrobeton.net/strafta/zoran-naskovski-mandala-i-krst-zbogom-oruzje/, accessed on Mar. 30, 2020

In almost all Eastern European countries, socialism reigned for a long time, and in most texts on utopias, it is presented in as an ideal system. The young people with whom the author spoke live in the post-communist era, in the period of globalization, while their countries are undergoing great political and economic changes, and the memory of the systems from the past remains problematic.

A utopia is always based on the principle of equality of its inhabitants, and individual desires and dreams are suppressed for the sake of the common good. Instead of applying global theories, the author stopped ordinary people on the street and asked them what their personal idea of an ideal place was.

To avoid any immediate social context, people were photographed in nature. They listed their name, age, place and country in which they live, and then described their imagined ideal place in a few sentences. This project compares different projections of utopia based on personal experience and personal wishes of young people from Eastern Europe in the early 2000s.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-292/26.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1360
Photo: Cultural Centre of Belgrade

The artist photographed ephemeral objects from the domain of production and consumption of knowledge on which various effects of use are visible, from touching of human bodies (backs) to damage by using or moving. Repairmen’s interventions that extended the duration of the objects can also be noticed. The photographs of the objects from the local environment in which the author plays a role in the production and consumption of knowledge are life-size.

In the Untitled (School Chairs) Series, the chosen elements are specific and there is no attempt to indicate a more definite meaning from them as a whole, but to form a visible wide-frame scheme that can be understood from the context. Also, the work is designed as a possible reflection of any private or public environment. The basic classification may relate to private, work and public space of the artist’s observation.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-168/1.6.2016.
Inventory No. 1424
Photo: Courtesy the artist

Selected Bibliography:
55^th October Salon, Disappearing Things. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2014
Milorad Mladenović: Neposredni konteksti, Nov. 17 – Dec. 11, 2016, catalogue of the solo exhibition, Art Gallery, Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2016

(…) To make the film Do You Intend to Lie to Me?, Miljanović used certain tactics to push the viewer into the world of brutal reality. Members of a special police unit stormed a cafe, arrested a man and escorted him to a police station in handcuffs, and helicopters monitored the entire operation from above. An interrogation ensues. Details of the suspect’s life are revealed with 26 questions. The audience feel as if they are standing on the other side of the one-way mirror in the interrogation room. They can hear the suspect’s replies, and are offered a brief look at the lie detector results.

The suspect is Veso Sovilj: an artist and a professor at the Art Academy in Banja Luka. He is the young artist’s mentor. Miljanović recorded a simulation of Sovilj’s arrest and interrogation. To make the scenes in the film as realistic as possible, Miljanović decided to work with professionals – he cooperated with members of the Republic of Srpska Special Police. The artist’s professor was not informed about the project, nor was he aware that he would have a role in a film, the leading role. After the filming was completed, Miljanović entered the interrogation room and explained that the purpose of the project was to mark the 30 years of his mentor’s artistic work. Upon hearing Miljanović’s explanation, Sovilj was thrilled.

The socio-political context of post-war Bosnian society, the consequences of wars that manifest themselves on the daily political scene, ethical and religious division and social instability are a constant in Miljanović’s art projects, performances, video works, installations. The film not only talks about the schizophrenic position of an individual within a post-war-torn state like Bosnia and Herzegovina, it also brutally metaphorically speaks about ignoring a man who devoted thirty years of his life to art by the state machinery.
Taken from the catalogue of the 52^nd October Salon

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-245/28.8.2014.
Inventory No. 1343
Photo: still from the film

Selected Bibliography:
52^nd October Salon, It’s Time We Met Each Other. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2011

Since 2012, Vladimir Miladinović has been following his daily routine in which he is devoted to archival research in the tabooed historical periods about which it is difficult to reach a broader social consensus.

By transferring, i.e., faithfully copying the collected material into the form of drawings, in the technique of ink wash, the artist makes a series of works through which he tries to establish a personal relation to the offered material. The works in this series are a kind of cathartic recollection, through which each viewer goes while reading the pages and articles – in the beginning only from Serbian newspapers of 1991 and 1992 – and compare them with their own inscribed knowledge of the events during the period of war in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, taken as the subject of the work.

In the later years, the research included the archive of articles about the same period from newspapers in Austria, Croatia, Spain and Ireland. The works, among other things, show some of the ways in which the dominant ideologies at a given moment carry out the process of ideological interpellation.

“The drawings were created as a result of a year-long research of the archival material kept at the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade. The subject of the research was the daily press from the early 1990s. Particular attention was paid to texts related to the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These were daily newspapers from the territory of Serbia: Politika, Večernje novosti, Politika ekspres and Borba. Emphasis was placed on two historical periods, November 1991 and August 1992. These two periods are two important neuralgic points for the context of contemporary Serbia, when talking about the war on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Both periods, viewed from the perspective of writing of the local press, give us a broader picture of what was happening in the recent past of Serbia and how, and these are also current issues in the new Serbian society. The current policies of remembrance of that period, the dominant narratives created today about these events, bring to the fore the question of personal responsibility, that is, how we will now relate to what is part of the public sphere of the society in which we live.”
Vladimir Miladinović, from the catalogue of the 53^rd October Salon

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-15-44/20.3.2014. (4 pcs)
Inventory No. 1341
Purchase Contract: III-5-477/1/15.12.2014. (3 pcs)
Inventory No. 1382
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Selected Bibliography:
53^rd October Salon, Good Life: Physical Narratives and Spatial Imaginations. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2012

The work was exhibited at the 56^th October Salon, The Pleasure of Love.

Parting, Dedicated to RM shows a group of four people in a landscape around the Rhine in Basel (Switzerland), where RM lived the second part of his life and died in the autumn of 2014. Different segments of the work suggest a series of interconnections in the relationships among these four persons, as well as a ritual related to one of them and the act of his departure.

The scenes were shot from five static camera positions. They are repeated several times during the video, emptied or with small differences in activities of the persons.

Cast: Jörg Besser, Heidi Feldmann, Bernhard Gilgen, Linnéa Schwarz

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract III-5-86/7.4.2017.
Inventory No. 106
Photo: still from the video work

It is a selection of photographs in which the protagonist of the photographic event is the Belgrade Shop Window. The first series was made in May 1980, during the national mourning days for the death of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Days of Pain and Pride, as the local press called them. The second series was made during the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in the spring of 1999. The third series was taken on February 21, 2008, and records the situation in the Serbian capital after Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17.

As in many of her other works (which are usually conceived as series), her knowledge of art history and photography can be detected in this one, too: I think that the historical references for these three series with shop windows would be dada and European surrealism, and of course Walter Benjamin’s writings. For all of them, as well as for the author herself, the shop window is a place, more precisely a sign, of the consumer society. Unlike her predecessors, however, Goranka Matić shows us shop windows in the local context (Titoism, war, i.e., the period of transitional economy) and thus points to the unbreakable relations between two different ideologies, the commodity and the political, be it socialist or nationalist. At the same time, these three series can be perceived as three historical stations in the life of Belgrade.
Bojana Pejić, from the exhibition catalogue of the 49^th October Salon

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-328/24.08.2018.
Inventory No. 112
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

The photo documents transformed into video essays are permeated with the images of the city, of the events that now already belong to history, of life and the author’s intimate world. Goranka’s greatest interest is in life, so the truthfulness of her photo recordings inspires pain and respect at the same time. The principle of honesty and the power to be present and empathic on the one hand, while on the other impartial and reserved to just the right extent, have made her one of the most significant visual artists from this part of the world. The photo essays record the events on the streets of Belgrade in March 1991, Slobodan Milošević’s appointment as President of the Republic of Serbia, a journey by Trans-Siberian Railway, women crossing borders, and memorabilia of the author’s life.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase contract: III-5-279/08.10.2021.
Inventory No.
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist

Lulić’s Museum of Revolution was originally designed as a work of monumental dimensions intended for a public space. In 2010 the inscription in red metal letters, inspired by the aestheticism of American billboards, was temporarily installed on the roof of the concrete extension of the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. The starting point for the work was the initiative for establishing and building the Museum of Revolution in Belgrade in the early 1960s, whose realization remained at the construction of its foundations, near the Museum of Contemporary Art. With this work, Lulić questions the meanings of the concepts “museum” and “revolution” – what the nature of a museum of revolution as an institution should be if we presume that the idea of the museum classification and presentation of a revolution is paradoxical, taking into account the fact that it is through revolution that institutional and social frameworks are re-examined; what a museum is today, what it should be like and what its role in society is. For the artist, this unrealized museum is a good example of how manifestos of a revolution can turn into symbols of decline. The work in the October Salon Collection is identical in form, while it differs in material and is intended for exhibiting in an inside (institutional) space, thus itself becoming a museum / gallery exhibit, highlighting the previously open questions without pretensions to provide definitive answers and leaving room for different interpretations. The work was exhibited at the 55^th October Salon.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-294/1/29.9.2014.
Inventory No. 043
Photo: Milan Kralj

Selected Bibliography:
Marko Lulić – FUTUROLOGY. Exhibition Jun. 30 – Sept.10, 2017, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Vfmk Verlag für moderne Kunst GmbH, Vienna, 2017
Marko Lulić – o. T. (Lichtung) / Untitled (Clearing). 2010 was realized for sculpture project kunstwegen raumsichten. Publication: edition kunstwegen Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Vienna, 2012
Marko Lulić DEATH OF THE MONUMENT. Dieser Katalog erscheint anlässlich der Ausstellung Marko Lulić New Works, Kunststiftung Erich Hauser, Oct. 10 – Nov. 1, 2009, Rottweil SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, Vienna, 2009