On Thursday, October 9th at 7 p.m., the exhibition “Unequal Geographies / Possibility of the Sublime” by the artistic duo diSTRUKTURA will open in the exhibition hall of the former Officers’ Home.
Milica Milićević and Milan Bosnić (diSTRUKTURA) graduated and received their master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Department of Painting. Since 2005, they have been working together as the artistic duo diSTRUKTURA and under that name have participated in over 30 solo and more than 70 group exhibitions in Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Romania, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Japan, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Croatia, Hungary, Finland and Egypt. diSTRUKTURA has participated in artist-in-residence programs and workshops in Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Italy, Finland, Egypt and Serbia. They are the recipients of several awards and scholarships, including the Pollock-Krasner grant for 2015. Their works are in over 15 public and private collections.
diSTRUKTURA continuously engages with landscape, examining the role of this genre and its formal modalities, starting from romantic painting, all the way to digital and artificially generated images. By addressing the essential connection of this artistic genre and its historical conditioning with ideas of identity, belonging, power and hegemony, they raise a number of questions concerning individual and collective awareness of biodiversity and the universal importance of its preservation, on the one hand, and unilateral economic interest, on the other. Through the artistic work of diSTRUKTURA, neglected differences between natural places, landscapes subordinated to human needs and virtual nature are mediated, that is, they point to the historical deprivation of the direct experience of nature.
This artistic couple is continuously present on the international contemporary art scene, and their work features landscapes of different meridians and vedutes of different cities around the world. The exhibition “Unequal Geographies” belongs to the project “Possibility of the Sublime” and, based on scenes from the mines of the former Zlatara Majdanpek, now managed by the Chinese company Zijin Mining, it speaks about the geopolitical aspect of a space and points to the worrying possibility of recognizing something that could perhaps be called the image of a colonial landscape, which is present in economically underdeveloped areas.
The dominant part of the exhibition in Niš is represented by paintings, which treat the category of the sublime in two ways. In a smaller number of works, through sequentiality and filtering, similar to digital manipulation of images, a certain landscape is presented as more delicate or exciting than the initial occasion itself. However, the primary principle in a larger number of works is the successive annulment of the landscape until its complete abolition, thus approaching “sublime destruction” no longer as an aesthetic category, but as a paradigm of human existence.
The exhibition in the Officers’ Home will include works of art in the fields of painting, photography and video. This is the first solo exhibition of diSTRUKTURA in Niš. They were participants in the art colony “Sićevo” in 2011, and their works were exhibited as part of numerous exhibitions from the Contemporary Painting Collection of the SLU Gallery, as well as in the 5th Niš Salol: 12/2. The exhibition in Niš is organized by the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts, after which it will be held in Kruševac and Čačak. A rich unified catalog will be published at the end of this year in co-publishing by the Art Gallery “Nadežda Petrović” Čačak, the Art Gallery Kruševac, the SLU Gallery Niš and the non-governmental organization ProArtOrg from Belgrade. In addition to diSTRUKTURA, the opening of the exhibition “Unequal Geographies / Possibility of the Sublime” will also be addressed by art historian Sanja Kojić Mladenov, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the text accompanying this exhibition. On behalf of the SLU Gallery, the curator is Milan Ristić.