IN LOW FLIGHT

During the opening artist will do a performance "In Low Flight".

 

An essential component in Mladen Miljanović’s practice is violence. From the materials he employs, the images and references he uses – his military past, the Yugoslav Wars, the trauma resulting from them – to what he makes himself endure during his performances – he would call it discipline or persistence –, the artist clearly uses elements of violent nature as well as the notion of violence as a complex raw substance. This simultaneously gives violence the role of a base to build on, a thematic to deal with and a tool which disintegrates during use and sublimates into its own cathartic, transcendental negation. The new group of works presented in acb Gallery unfolds further in the narrative exploration of how violence and healing are complexly interconnected and how the artist can permute violent acts or non-acts into individual or collective healing processes.

 

Another emblematic work entitled Future (2016) presents a piece of black granite adorned with the eponymous engraving and supported by crutches. Future’s portrait is made of violence. It looks like a tombstone, a dead, long-forgotten possibility lost in the infinite starry sky of the cosmos. But Future stands like a man, leaning against the wall and staring at us, the Present. Future is a wounded man whose image projects the bleak and uneasy perspective of a physically and psychologically traumatised humanity’s future. Future is, or should be full of hope, though. But Future is still standing. Future looks at us, the Present and is clearly playing the role of a mirror of shame, a heart-smothering reminder of the consequential permeability between the now and its possible long-term outcomes. Without any pathos, the work makes a clear statement; we, the Present, have all the keys in hand not to turn Future into a wounded, lame perspective or worse, to bury it. Hope is tiny, but does exist.