Mandala and Cross / Farewell to Arms
installation (video projection, black–and-white, colour, double carousel slide projection / 2 x eighty colour slides, 2 slide projectors, 2 microphones, sound)
variable dimensions
2014
The installation Mandala and Cross / Farewell to Arms is a series of crossed video and drawn-into-space carousel slide projections, which forms a space for a tense relationship between the scenes of empty holsters for weapons, used and discarded, and scenes of details from decorative plates, made in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the Keramika Company from Bratunac, B&H. The stroboscopic method, based on the source of light that is rhythmically turned on and off, produces an intertwined sequence of the mentioned motifs. On the plates are the motifs of Yugoslav cities, painted in the form of mandalas, made in the early seventies, at the time of specific political turmoil, intensive armament and political shifts.
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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zoran Naskovski (1960, Izbište, Serbia) obtained his master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade. He works in a wide range of media such as video, film, performance, installation, photography and internet projects. In his critical practices, he deals mainly with the topics of political and economic violence, media manipulations, policies of global circulation of images and migrations, institutional criticism, including critical writing about the Serbian national cultural policy. Naskovski has participated in numerous international exhibitions at important museums and institutions, including Whitney Museum in New York, Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Tate Britain in London, Fridericianum Kassel in Kassel, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin. He participated in the central exhibition of the 52nd Venice Biennale Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense in 2007. He received the Nadežda Petrović Memorial Award in 1996, the Award of the Annual Exhibition of the Centre for Contemporary Art Belgrade in 1997, the Award of the 44th October Salon in 2003 and the 47th October Salon in 2006.