Mladen Miljanović. The Artist and the Issue of Context (original) (raw)

Riding J (2016) 'Representing a divided place: the artistic-military practice of Mladen Miljanović', Cultural Geographies. Advance online publication.

This essay on the work of the Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanović, born in Zenica, Yugoslavia, in 1981, is wrought around an account of the divided place in which his art is mobilised. Following a short military term, Miljanović enrolled at the Academy of Arts, in Banja Luka, where he still lives. A potent opposition to a divisive ethno-nationalist politics ever-present in the post-conflict, post-socialist, transition era of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Miljanović deploys what he calls an artistic-military practice. Incorporating cartographic and military surveying techniques learnt at a reserve officer military school, Miljanović deconstructs his own soldierly past and interrogates, through his artistic-military practice, an ethno-nationalist militarised Bosnia-Herzegovina. I focus in the main here on the artist's recent attempt to represent post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, a granite triptych entitled, The Garden of Delights.

Uneasy Transformation. The Critical Potential of Art in Sarajevo

Artportal, 2019

This paper is the outcome of my field trip in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2018, in the frame of the East Art Mags residency programme and with the support of Erste Foundation. This version is a compilation of an essay based on interviews with artists and art professionals, and the transcript of an in-depth inteview conducted with a young artist. The texts originally published on Artportal.hu/East Art Mags explore artistic articulations of the country's traumatic heritage and the role of independent art institutions in challenging ethno-nationalist political positions, which characterize present-day politics.

The Bosnian Case: Art, History and Memory

2018

The Bosnian Case: Art, History and Memory concerns the representation of historic and traumatogenic events in art through the specific case of the war in Bosnia 1992-1995. The research investigates an aftermath articulated through the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, rebounding on the nature of representation in the art as always in the space of an "afterness". The ability to represent an originary traumatic scenario has been questioned in the theoretics surrounding this concept. Through The Bosnian Case and its art historical precedents, the research challenges this line of thinking, identifying, including through fieldwork in Bosnia in 2016, the continuation of the war in a war of images.

A brief narrative of selected art events in Serbia, 1948-2001

East Art Map, edited by Irwin; Afterall, Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, 2006, pp. 287-297, 2006

This text is constructed as a brief illustrated survey of the most significant art events in Serbia in the second half of the 20th century. Some of these events helped shape the artistic ideologies of their time, while others influenced later art processes. As with any survey of this kind, there are drastic exclusions. The criteria used in selecting artists and events were designed to capture aspects of Serbian art that make it both distinctive for the local scene and relevant for the wider international context. With but two exceptions I have limited this text to events that took place in Serbia for the sole reason that other contributors to East Art Map will treat art practices in the other regions of the former Yugoslavia, which once constituted a unified political and artistic territory.

Branislava Anđelković / Branislav Dimitrijević THE FINAL DECADE: ART, SOCIETY, TRAUMA AND NORMALITY •From: On Normality – Art in Serbia, 1989-2001, (w B. Andjelković and D. Sretenović), Museum of Contemporary Art, Beograd, 2005.

Branislava Anđelković / Branislav Dimitrijević THE FINAL DECADE: ART, SOCIETY, TRAUMA AND NORMALITY • O Normalnosti – Umetnost u Srbiji, 1989-2001, (w B. Andjelković and D. Sretenović), Museum of Contemporary Art, Beograd, 2005. , 2005