5 September - 12 October, 2019
EASTTOPICS SPACE
Képíró utca 6
1053 Budapest
Hungary
Photography by Atóth Dávid
Easttopics is proud to present Milica Mijajlović’s
first solo exhibition in Hungary as a result of the young artist’s residency in
Budapest. Featuring her most recent paintings on textile as well as objects and
a video piece realized specifically for this show, the project explores the
artist’s reminiscences about the Yugoslav war, more precisely about the bombing
of Belgrade in 1999 that she experienced as a small child. The flashes of the
explosions that she first innocently misinterpreted as fireworks constitute the
central motif of her works, which conceptualize – both in their symbolic
content and in their technical characteristics – the swirling confusion and
antithetic emotions felt ever since by the artist in the apprehension of this
traumatic period.
This disconcerting bitter sweet
characteristic of her present practice further unfolds in objects combining
used, dirty wheel trims and forms made of caramelized sugar that evoke sharp
serrated blades or elaborated fire arms. The artist's new video work explores
her equally ambivalent relation to Serbian turbo-folk music and its flashy,
latex-dressed performers who became national stars during the nineties, the
Milošević regime and the Yugoslav war. Therefore, not only does Milica
Mijajlović deal with her individual war trauma, but also tackles a phenomena
all of us can relate to; the embellishment of childhood experiences - should
they be related to food, music, clothing, visual culture or more concretely
perturbing events such as international conflicts - and the disillusive
reflection, critical processing of these memories as a necessary operation to
become adult.
Milica Mijajlović (1993) is a student at the
Department of Fine Arts at The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design,
Prague, in the class of Michal Novotný and Jiří
Černický. Her artistic practice focuses mostly on
painting, though recently she has been working with other media such as text,
objects and performance. Her work is predominantly a reflection of her personal
memories which she connects with current issues, mostly using the language of
symbols. Her most recent solo shows are Awaiting
a Big Event at the Rampa Gallery in Usti nad Labem (Czech Republic) and Wish You Were Not Here at The Solution
in Prague (Czech Republic). She is originally from Belgrade, Serbia, but
currently she is based in Prague, Czech Republic.