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

Mladen Miljanović (1981, BA) attended the Reserve Officer School where he earned the rank of sergeant. After that he enrolled at the Academy of Arts (Department of Painting) in Banja Luka. Miljanović also deals with the social and therapeutic aspects of art, being the initiator of workshops for the disabled. He has based his art work on his own life experience: on the one hand it is the experience of growing up during the war and after the war in the destroyed, impoverished, ethnically and territorially divided, and externally isolated country; on the other hand it is his formal education. The consequences of the war (work with war invalids) and knowledge gained in military school (use of senseless military image vocabulary in a new artistic context), makes the basic field of reference of Miljanović’s work as an artist. In 2007 he was awarded the Zvono award for best young artist in BA, and in 2009 the Henkel Art.Award. He has exhibited several times in BA, Germany (Taxi to Berlin, Antje Wachs gallery, Berlin, 2011), Austria (Museum Service, MUMOK, Museum Modern Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2010) and in other places. He lives and works in Banja Luka, BA.