PM GALLERY: Good Night (State of Body)

HDLU, PM Gallery
5 – 24 October 2012

 
Good Night (State of the Body) is an exhibition concept consisting of three main parts: a video called Do You Intend to Lie to Me, a series of photographs titled Show Me Where It Hurts, and the performance On the Edge.

The context of the exhibition can be described as the Oedipal position of various subjects. It is manifested through the interaction of the personal, political, and artistic positions of the body within the society, from three different standpoints. In order to describe art, the artist, actions, and systems, notions such as tactics, strategies, and simulations have become an integral part of the contemporary interpretation of art. In these artworks, I seek to explore the current state of the body, first from the position of artist Veso Sovilj, in a film about him that was shot without his knowledge. The second part, Show Me Where It Hurts, presents a shocking document about the communication between two people, one of them completely deaf and disabled (suffering from PTSD, the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, as a consequence of recent wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia). This artwork raises the issue of ethical behaviour, provoked by images of violence, and a person’s body as the object/product of mental and ideological aggression.

The third segment, performance On the Edge, shows the artist as having to position himself adequately with regard to the other artworks presented at this exhibition. It is an attempt of achieving a reverse situation, where the brutal external reality is shown in a pleasant, protected art space, whereby the artist’s body is brought into a transitional or temporary position on the borderline between these two realities, internal and external.

The title of the exhibition, Good Night (State of the Body) refers to a special state of the human body, the moment in which it passes from being conscious into the unconscious. That interrelation is the basic discourse of these artworks, which show the marginal-transient position of the body and our control over it.

Mladen Miljanović