Mladen Miljanović’s video work “Sounds of the Homeland” can be viewed at the Balkan Cinema as part of the exhibition “In the ravines of the Balkans”, open to visitors from April 8 to 30, 2021. This artist was born in Zenica in 1981, and in addition to artistic practice and research, he teaches New Media at the Academy of Arts of the University of Banja Luka. He participated in the 55th Venice Biennale, the 15th Busan Biennale and the recent 13th Cairo Biennale. His solo exhibitions and works were represented in the contemporary art museum MUMOK in Vienna, the MC Gallery in New York, the ACB Gallery in Budapest, and many others. Educated as an academic painter, Miljanović today combines performative and conceptual strategies through a pluralistic, socially engaged and subversive approach to contemporary art.
“Sounds of the Homeland” is a fifteen-minute video and represents an artistic resemnatization that takes and combines already existing original songs – different versions of the same song “Napravila Amerika od Bosna druzju”, by Ante Bubal. The space of song and art is used as a potential neutral space and platform of culture where any kind of connection is possible, because it is a space to which everyone claims but no one is its absolute owner. On the other hand, the work is the product of reflection on the current position of veterans from all three armies of the last war, and the question of the purpose of the struggle from today’s point of view, as well as the possibility of a utopia of the opposing collectivity. The work was filmed in May 2018 and produced in 2019 in cooperation with the film crew of Greg Blakey, an Australian director with an address in Berlin, and the author of the photo documentation is Nemanja Mićević.
How do you see your work “Sounds of the Homeland” in the context of the entire exhibition “In the Ravines of America”, in relation to other works and the exhibition space?
First of all, I liked the context of the very name of this space – Bioskop Balkan. Dealing with this topic at Bioskop Balkan, with three artists from the regional scene, is already a context in itself. Even if we exhibited a white paper at this exhibition, in my opinion, that is enough context that the exhibition can actually be seen as problematic.
Then we realized that in a similar period of time, America was mentioned in some segment or some form of our work. The whole process was natural and there was no rape of the context. The works simply came together, and curator Ksenija Samardžija recognized that connection and invited us, which suited us perfectly. To present an exhibition like this in the context of the Balkan Cinema, which is ironically and sarcastically positioned towards the romanticized position of the Balkans, and we also deal with irony – what America actually means here. For me, it was quite enough relations between the works, and in the works themselves, that together with this place, it all makes an interesting concept.
To what extent do your expectations from the work “Sounds of the Homeland” correspond with the reactions of the audience on the spot, and do you have the impression that the effects are in line with your possible expectations?
This is primarily about a happening or, more precisely, a delegated performance, where the documentation of that event is presented to the audience via video. In a structural sense, this would mean that the presented work does not represent a work of art in itself, but indicates through documentation that the form of an artistic event once, somewhere happened there. I apostrophize this because the postfestum reaction of the audience to the work is not that important to me, and it is also something that the artist has no influence on. This work as a happening produced the form of video as one of its material facts, and it is up to us now to continue living with that fact. And finally, to translate all this, the reaction of the audience is not crucial or particularly important to me, but when it comes to this work, it is very positive and interesting. I attribute this type of reaction in this work to the large amount of Bosnian black humor that is found in this work.
What else do you do / what do you create these days and how important is the topic of “Balkan ravines” for your entire creative oeuvre, if we look back at these “ravines” precisely through stereotypical views and prejudices related to these geographical/national areas?
We live in a world that is one big ravine, the diversity of that ravine is manifold, and most of the time it is only about nuances in the diversification of these differences and similarities. The world is fascinated by fragmentation, fragmentation, parcelization, that’s what they would say – we like to grind it up. What interests me in art is unification, the use of art as a binder that will re-grow, glue or unite these fragmented and disjointed forms. It is in this work that everything that was ground, crushed and destroyed by the discontinuity of the 90s is brought together, if only for a moment, by the song “Sounds of the Homeland”. And it not only connects, but also maps the spaces of social, social and national injustice as the basic generators of this fragmentation and fragmentation. Stereotypes that encourage unfairness and discrimination become the foundations of disunity and isolationism that tends to demonize the other or the different. What I am currently working on now tends to transform the specific cultural pattern of representation of death into the form of time and media today. And how and what the form of traditional representation and new media can produce, the audience in Belgrade will have the opportunity to see at the end of this year at the independent exhibition on which I am currently working.