“A pair of lions at the gate is an archetypal image; they guard something precious. Of course, this can be seen as ‘bad taste’, explained as a need to express power, especially in the times of poverty and uncertainty. But in this gesture of ‘decorating’, on the elemental level, there is a private need for the beautiful. At the opposite end of the wide field of art, there are icons of the avant-garde. One gets the impression that most of the art production of the second half of the twentieth century is, in fact, a dialogue with a few giants, with their work but also with their ‘image’. In this dialogue, the persons who challenged the conventions were slowly becoming indisputable and untouchable. A simple collage gesture is not just the intersection of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ – it is an attempt to unobtrusively ask the question: What is it that is valuable about modern art?”
Lóránd Hegyi, Catalogue of the 48^th October Salon

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract III-5-221/14.8.2014.
Inventory No. 1335, 1372, 1373
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

The work Orvieto consists of 11-meter-long photographs and drawings, whose parallel streams of dark and light lines of the Gothic façade level the metaphor of the continuity of our life flows, travels, distance, time. In this polyptych – fragments of the Gothic façade of the Orvieto Cathedral, among which drawings/gouaches or paintings are interpolated – the concept of citation and repetition is consistently and fully implemented. But this time there is no code, either enlightening or any other, which should be deciphered. Their uniqueness lies in the subtle transition and connecting of the photographic template with the manual world of the painting and in creating the mysterious relationship between the document and memory, the past and present, matter and form, the real and the imagined, the unreturnable and unendable…

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-479/1/15.12.2014.
Inventory No. 1383
Photo: Courtesy the artist 

Selected Bibliography:
Lidija Merenik, Mileta Prodanović: biti na nekom mestu biti svuda biti, Foundation Vujičić Collection, Belgrade, 2011
45^th October Salon, Continental Breakfast. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2004
48^th October Salon, Micro-Narratives. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2007

The History of Young Prodanović belongs to the group of family stories through which Prodanović asks himself, above all: Where are we from? Who are we? Where are we going? He is searching for answers in the history of his family as well as in putting that family in a historical context of the disjointed courses which the Serbian people took in different periods of its turbulent history on the frontier. In the cycle of works titled GENUS – Family Stories, based on documents and written or told family records, Prodanović reconstructs the fragments of his family’s history, which in the 18^th century took them away from their place of origin in Old Herzegovina to the north, in the direction of Western Serbia. One brother settled on the slopes of Mountain Maljen; the other went to Vojvodina. One brother’s offspring lived in a family cooperative, which was not formally abolished before the early 20^th century, whereas the other branch of the family tried to find its place in the rising modern European society. Both branches struggled in new surroundings, in the states that were not theirs, in order to have a better life and stop being second-class citizens.

The basis of The History of Young Prodanović is a folk song about Mihailo Prodanović, a young military leader in the army of Empress Maria Theresa, who fought in the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748, and whose merits earned him a medal and noble status.

“This work is created as a video projection with the images of the facades of baroque buildings in Donauworth, at whose openings inserts from films dedicated to this period (including Saša Petrović’s Migration) are alternately shown, while the song The History of Young Prodanović is performed with the gusle accompaniment. Such an audio-visual composition carries us over into the bloody battles described in the memoirs of Simeon Piščević, in which Vuk Isakovič and the Slavonian-Danube regiment died, and into the clash between the capricious European rococo architecture and the terrifying Balkan sound. The symbolism of the repetitive temporal course of history is marked by two projections of waterfalls, which laterally close the central space of the exhibition.”

Introduction to the exhibition Genus – Family Stories, Čedomir Vasić

“All my works, after all, testify to the times in which I live… There are different media and other kinds of variety in my works, it is a face of freedom offered by the ‘time of dispersion’ which followed after the dissolution of the ‘grand narratives’ of modernism. Of course, the position of freedom in expression should be won as well as preserved. I believe there is in any case some kind of constancy about my work, which may not be obvious at first glance, but which persists in the need for the metaphor, indirect speech, or parabole.”

A suitcase of Mileta Prodanović’s historical memories, curator Julka Marinković’s interview with the author.

The gusle, voice: Danilo Krstajić; Sound recorder: Vladimir Sl. Janković; Image processing and montage: Filip Čekić

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-299/22.10.2021.
Inventory No.
Photo: Courtesy the artist 

Selected Bibliography:
Mileta Prodanović, GENUS – porodične priče, 16. XII 2017 – 26. I 2018, Art gallery „Nadežda Petrović“, Čačak, Serbia, exhibition catalogue.