MILICA TOMIC – ONE
DAY
CURATED BY EUGENIO
VIOLA
Gallery z2o, Rome
Gallery z2o is pleased to present the first solo show in Rome for Milica
Tomic, born in former Yugoslavia. Entitled One Day, the artist realizes a
project that began in 2009 in Belgrade, then in Copenhagen, and now in Rome.
The show consists of a performance in relation to the photographs and video in
the gallery space.
Milica Tomic belongs to a generation of artists that in the 90s, was
compelled to identify and recognize itself on a basis of state and nationality.
This generation is rooted within a specific geographic and cultural origin that
necessarily confronted with political ideologies and with history, exposing itself
to a series of questions that are incapable of eliminating from their practice.
A condition lived like a part of the artistic vocation, unable to be ignored,
almost like a part of the actual destiny.
Do they elaborate politics and history from an aesthetic point of view?
Does the artist need to be political or apolitical? Can the artist have an
actual, personal view of history? Milica Tomic answers these questions with a
caustic re-reading of the past and its stratifications, its symbols and marks, elaborated
across a complexity of references in which the same story and events are
correlated and introduced into a mental context that is open, vital, and
conflicting, if not deliberately provocative. Leaving the trauma of former
Yugoslavia’s disintegration, Tomic investigates in an often autobiographical
manner, the political and media violence filtered across the individual and
collective experience.
Symbolic of its modus operandi is the project One Day (2009-12), begun
in Belgrade with a public action and without authorization, during which the
artist goes for a walk in town flaunting a machine gun under her arm, in an
extremely natural way, as if she were carrying a grocery bag or an umbrella,
and retraces the places defeated by the supporters of the National Motion of
Liberation during WWII against the fascist troops. The artist repeated this
unauthorized walk in Copenhagen and finally in Rome, refuting, with the same
procedure, in different places and different times, all sharing the memory of
the antifascist resistance.
In One Day, the cinematic virtue of invalidating time and different
spaces are all pushed to the extreme by Tomic, according to a strategy that
defines “artificial landscape” or “creative geography,” expressions borrowed
from the technical homonym of film production invented from Lev Kuleshov in the
1920s. The present tense meets the past and merges into a single, irrepressible
presence, created by the violence and ancient abuses of power that are
reflected in the rekindling of old and new intolerances, in the new barbarity
of the terrorism but also through hypocrisy, in conformity, indifference or in
anger. The artist defines the American realpolitik as a condition of “permanent
war,” like trotzkyism. “This new type of war introduced a specific mechanism of
criminalization and also redefined particular ethnic groups, status, religious
groups and political organizations outside of the law – the artist declares – a
permanent era of war that leaves an open question: who is the terrorized and
who the terrorist?” (M. Tomic).
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento
Nota. Solo i membri di questo blog possono postare un commento.