Mantra
video
5’30”
edition: 1/5
2006
The video performance in which the artist carries different flags while walking on a deserted road, somewhere on the outskirts of Sarajevo, talks about a constant return to the past, often used by politicians as a means of manipulating the population. The work is really about the burden of the past that every political option that comes to power leaves us with, and therefore this story has no beginning and no end.
Mantra was premiered in Belgrade at the exhibition Collection 3. Searching for…, curated by Aleksandra Estela Bjelica Mladenović, at the Art Gallery.
The work was awarded at the first SPAPORT biennial in Banja Luka in 2008.
Initially, the artist is carrying the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But as she is walking the empty road, somebody (we don’t see who) is throwing all the other flags that used to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina through history, twenty-four of them. At the moment when she is to take the current flag, the one used after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, all the others are starting to fall out of her hands due to the burden she is carrying.
The title of the work also refers to the process during which, after a relentless repetition, an individual enters a state of nirvana, only that nirvana, in the process a people go through due to the repetition of history, is equal to complete numbness and apathy.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-219/1/14.8.2014.
Inventory No. 1338
Photo: still from the video work
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gordana Anđelić-Galić (1949, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina). She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, History Department, in 1975 and, in 1988, from the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts. She has had a large number of solo and group exhibitions and received numerous awards; participated in the Venice Biennale twice, but at the invitation of other countries – Italy and South Korea. In 2012 she was appointed Director of the Collegium Artisticum Gallery in Sarajevo. Lives and works in Sarajevo.