In My Parents Bedroom

Miljanović’s work is full of seemingly irrational actions: from death-defying stunts of holding onto the frame windows of art galleries and museums; throwing bombs in the air; driving his audience in a taxi to his exhibition; giving the audience a military salute; to creating military maps that plan his invasion of key strategic galleries in Europe. What these gestures all share is not just observing and engaging with the art world institutions from the position of marginality, but using this position of ‘not-quite-art-world’ or ‘not-quite-Europe’ to reframe our perception of art as contemporary global lingua franca.

In “In My Parents Bedroom”, this is evident in his incorporation of ‘found’ lyrics of a folk song as an epic folkloric narration of the global health crisis. ‘Bird Flu’ acts as a mediator between the global and local perspective on a media event, and as a signifier of the ‘Balkanisation’ of that event. The humorous and camp lyrics of the song generate tensions between competing narratives (documentary and lyrical, pre-modern epic and contemporary documentary form, vernacular and popular culture), and position our perspective at the ‘impossible’ intersection between them.

This is also evident in one of the centrepieces of the exhibition titled ‘The Black Hole’. Using holes in the road to create a post-minimalist wall sculpture, Miljanović remixes the universal narratives of abstraction through the lived reality of BiH in 2016. His referencing of the historical exhibition ‘When Attitude Becomes Form’ – recreated in 2013 by Prada in Venice – shows us the three faces of the 20th century art: as critical avant-garde, as a commercial spectacle, and as a Western-centric frame for understanding the present. Regarding the last point, the Black Hole represents not only the material emanation of the politically charged space dividing RS and the Federation, but also a powerful designation of the ontological void of Europe, which is being transformed in the present.