30. september – 21. october, 2021.
The exhibition Cosmic Rhythms introduces new dynamics to the space of the Balkan Cinema. This show was being conceived and prepared for a long time, coming out as a result of the artist’s reaction to the exhibitive space itself, which simply calls to be manipulated, involved and recreated…
The installation that Milena Mijović Durutović builds quietly and spontaneously stands in synergy with the very space of the Balkan Cinema, whose monumental structure provides endless possibilities. Milena follows her personal impulses relying on senses and intuition. Her monochrome, purified, organic works form cycles, which bring to the fore the established rhythms of nature. Everything is connected and coexists in harmony. There are no disturbances or tension; contrasts are there only to intensify and provoke the dialogue between strong pigments, shadows, light and darkness, creating rhythms that meditatively take is into the realm of universal symbols. The setup is designed as a unified whole, a unique structure made up of canvases, objects and video works that pay homage to the artist’s infinite playfulness and joy—the driving forces in the creative process behind this exhibition.
Special thanks are due to the Contemporary Art Centre of Montenegro, for their generous cooperation and support.
– Ksenija Samardžija
Disciplined Imagination
Even though they appear seductive in the “white cube” of an art gallery, the works of Milena Mijović Durutović achieve their full expression only when they are confluent with the energies of some more specific space. Displays in non-typical exhibition venues reinforce the significance of visitors’ movement and investigation of works from different perspectives, as well as discerning the works’ scale and the ways they occupy a given space. The immediate corporeal presence of the viewer in an environment into which the artist builds her works allows for an active synthesis of impressions on the relation between the painting, material, surface and the surroundings, the painterly gesture and compositions within the frame of the paintings, compositional variations in the series of works belonging to one cycle, as well as the manners in which the paintings were brought into a dialogue with the space in which they were installed. In case of installations, it is even more significant, because she always develops them in a concrete space, in correlation with its characteristics, and in line with the ways in which the audience can be brought into it.
The design of Milena Mijović Durutović’s exhibition in the Cinema Balkan was being conceived for several months, and it took a whole week to actually mount it. Even though all the works included in the exhibition had already been shown elsewhere and could quite easily be presented in a similar fashion in the Cinema Balkan, the author was challenged by the specific nature of the space and multiple possibilities of installing artworks in it, so she started a quest for the type of display which would simultaneously establish the dialogue with the exhibition space and enable its visual and experiential transformation. Mounting the exhibition came as a continuation to the process of production of individual works that took place in the artist’s studio, along with the series of experiments with their spatial organization and ambientalization in former exhibitions; the idea was to establish relation between the installation on the ground floor of the Cinema Balkan with the fragmentary nature of that space, as well as between the facture of the paintings on the lower ground floor with the facture of the walls around them.
Experimenting with the ways of displaying works in relation to the spatial and technical resources offered by the Cinema Balkan resulted in three separate exhibitions on three levels of the building. The ground floor is taken up by an intensely illuminated wire installation, which floats in the central part of the space. Constantly changing with fluctuations of air temperature, it casts shadows in the shape of linear drawings and acts as a counterpoint to the display of oval shapes below, which are painted in pure blue pigment. The title of that installation is “Vibrations”. It spreads though the space in a number of ways, taking its central part and establishing a dialogue with its structure, as well as with all the details present in it. In the perceptual experience of the viewer, it shapes a specific interplay of impressions in which the chromatic is contrasted with the achromatic, the closed shape with the open structure, the tactility with the play of light and shadows, and the multiplicity of its segments with the compact nature of the whole.
On the floor below “Vibrations”, there is the display of “Depths”. These are the paintings executed in blue and black pigment on transparent black jute that lets the light go through it, while at the same time it accentuates the material aspect of those paintings and demonstrates their porosity, distancing them from the modernist principle of flatness in a very drastic manner. On the second floor below the ground, there is a display of the works from the cycle titled “Traces”. It consists of canvases grounded with soil and painted in pigments of strong intensities in order to achieve forms brought to the proximity of signs, yet without quoting conventional sign systems. During the process of the paintings’ making, it seems as if certain elements and signs were surfacing from the author’s unconsciousness, sublimated in such a way so as to evade standard interpretation methods. And, even if there was a sign system under which they could be subsumed, it would be the sole product of the author, which can only be observed by synthesizing, classifying, analyzing and interpreting the formal character of those signs.
The reduced abstract semiotic quality of the works, along with their shapes devoid of any narrativity and filled with strong pictorial intensities, are the result of the author’s quest for universality. It is her striving to overcome cultural barriers and already codified meanings, which were fixed by different sets of positive knowledge that are often applied to interpretations of culture and arts. It targets the audience who is keen to confront these works by being open to immediate sensory and intellectual experience; those who are willing to leave all the implied and presupposed baggage acquired through the process of education and socialization, as well as from their past experiences of observing similar art works. That striving towards universality does not include stepping away from the social, cultural, institutional, economic and political contexts, nor does it wish to ignore them, but insists on the active emancipation from any type of one-dimensional determination by them.
To name this striving towards universality, the author was using the word “cosmos” as a metaphor for the unlimited orderly system, whose regularities influence the multiplicity of the limited worlds within it, and in the form of rhythms to which they are exposed. Therefore, all these works count on the viewers, whose bodies are not merely products of bio-politics, nor are the horizons of their experience irrecoverably confined within the social and political frameworks in which we encounter them. These are the viewers who would approach this experience by evoking their own inner rhythms, and based on them analyze the paintings’ compositions, the manner in which they are staged and how they might affect their behavior and movement through the concrete exhibition space. As Henry Lefebvre stressed when defining rhythmanalysis, the basic condition for analyzing rhythms in the outer world is to get familiar with one’s inner rhythms, and establish balance between them.
The principles of abstraction and expression, as well as striving towards universality of the visual language and the viewers’ emancipation in Milena Mijović Durutović’s poetics, are joined with her own procedural approach to the execution of the works, and then to staging the exhibition into which they are integrated. It is based on tracing the rhythms of inner and outer nature during all the phases of creative process, and continuous channelling of her expression towards the repetition of motifs and variations in the application of certain visual solutions. Her works, stepping away from the iconic character of the sings that they employ, are made to be indexical in that they do not manifest some external content, but only the traces of the creative process. Each cycle of her works is a kind of testimony to the creative process—not as a document, but as the index of successful solutions of the key visual and formal problems she attends to in her work.
“Disciplined imagination” is a phrase that Milena Mijović Durutović introduced a while ago, in one of her interviews for the Podgorica daily newspaper “Pobjeda”. She used it to name the process of constant reduction of the expression to only what is deemed necessary. If the initial impulse that leads towards an artwork can be expressed by using only one or two colours, a modular structure, or a simple readymade shape accentuated by the layer of raw pigment, then anything beyond that may be considered superfluous. Also, for a cycle of works to be consistent, it is quite enough that it is based on a variation of one motif, or one plastic problem. On the other hand, the more the work is reduced in its original form, the wider is the spectrum of its interactions within the contexts in which it is exhibited. As opposed to the containment of the imagination by project-oriented thinking where everything is predefined, the disciplined imagination is actively fostered—only its expressions are reduced to what is truly essential.
– Stevan Vuković
Photo: Marina Bugarčić
Photo: Igor