Mladen Miljanović – born in Zenica (Yugoslavia) in 1981, completed the secondary school in Doboj. After the secondary school he attended the Reserve Officer Military School. In 2002 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka department of painting. Beside his artistic practice and research, he is teaching Intermedia Art at The Academy of Arts, University of Banja Luka.
His conceptual approach is questioning its own surrounding and living conditions: on one hand his work is influenced by the experience of growing up during the war and its aftermath in the destroyed, impoverished, ethnically and territorially divided, and externally isolated country. From the primary education of being painter now he combines performative, cinematic and conceptual strategies into pluralistic, socially engaged and subversive contemporary art approach. In that approach art is not a goal, but more a tool.
He participated 55th Venice Biennale, 15th Busan Video biennale and recently 13th Cairo Biennale among other group shows. His solo shows and projects were at MUMOK – Vienna, Gallery MC – New York, ACB Gallery – Budapest, Antje Wachs Gallery – Berlin, Neue Galerie Graz and many others.
Happening Balkana, 2005
Happening Balkana, 2005
Happening Balkana, 2005
Black Hole
Black Hole
Black Hole
The Didactic Wall
The Didactic Wall
The Didactic Wall
The Final Battle
The Final Battle
The Final Battle
Selected works:
Happening Balkana
Project, realised in cooperation with UDAS and LSN,
4 days happening with war disabled persons.
2005
Putting myself in a position of an artist and a moderator of emancipation who as his basic ground takes negative forms of history and uses art as a means of sublimation of those forms. Gathering that certain group of population which is the most sensible spot of social trauma caused by consequences of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These are the people with invalidity coming from all three ethnic groups, who have missing body parts from fighting one another in civil war during 1991-1995.
This delegated performance gathered 12 participants and lasted 4 days. Participants dealt with creative works and 80% of them are people with missing body parts. On that happening around 20 pictures and sculptures was created. Most of the participants never went to art school and their creativity is mostly product of discharging of the psychical energy though the work as a sublimate object. Knowing that their works will be publicly presented and that this gathering has connections and similarities to art colonies of higher rate of cultural events, has contributed to decreasing of the tensions caused by yesterday’s trauma caused by their enemies. Neurosis and excitation have now occurred for the proving of their personal creative abilities and their public presentation. And this whole time and space event had as a goal a quest to turn the attention from social/ethnic differences or to ironically play with them for a while.
A Black Hole
Installation,
plaster objects, variable dimensions
2016
– Action was a process of mapping asphalt/road holes.
– Holes are mapped by drawing transfers to the papers.
– Mapped relation is between two politically most conflicted cites in the region.
– Mapped relation is a trunk road Banja Luka – Sarajevo of 232 km.
– After two days of mapping, there is 67 holes drawings collected.
– In the next stage of the project I arranged asphalt to fill holes with road maintenance service.
Black Hole project is public action examining invisible/absent public form as obstacle of social, cultural or political relation. In this project artist is a worker who is mapping and collecting form of social absence. One of the questions in this piece is when the geographical relations are becoming political forms, and is it possible to maintain or mark missing parts in these relations. As in previous works, my goal is to research position of artist and to develop strategies to act as society service and to produce a form from that process of service.
The Didactic Wall
handbooks, ready-made, adhesive letters on wall, engraved drawings on marble,
installation and opening, collaboration with Krak organisation and city Gallery Bihać,
2019
In the content sense, the Didactic Wall and publications contain transformed illustrations, schemes and diagrams from military books, which show, among other things, how to move and survive in difficult circumstances, overcome natural barriers, to orientate and move during the night and difficult visibility conditions. How to facilitate the movement of the elderly, the children, or point the first aid to the injured person. The publication is printed in 3 editions since 2019 in more than 2000 copies and is multilingual (English, Arabic, Spanish and Urdu+German in 3rd edition). Pocket format publication is due to its practicality in carrying and using with noticeable enlarged text. The idea was to make the publication available on various geographic locations, which would be of practical use but also available in the online electronic version of pdf. Within the exhibition, which would be publicly available, the subject didactic wall (2.65 x 5.76 m), featuring in stone engraved drawings, illustrations, diagrams and texts, explaining in detail the specific situations and the ways of how to overcome them. The representation of the same illustrations on the billboards tends to “intermittently” represent some of these practical examples of moving aid. The whole project does not seek to estimate the hard times of migration by means of artistic means but by trying to make it easier and to point to the necessity of empathy and help on that path.
The Final Battle
film, 65min, 1:2, DCP-4K, stereo,
Introvert Films Berlin & Asimetrik
2024
This film documents four delegated performances/castings, featuring participants who are both directly and indirectly actors of war: veterans, civilian victims, disabled individuals, or those traumatised by conflict. Applicants that have been seduced to participate in four castings of imaginary movie altogether agreeing to be part not only of an experimental film, but also of a subversive cinematic social experiment.
With this poignant cinematic depiction of the personal and far-reaching impacts of war, this sobering antiwar movie project raises questions about the allure of violence and war that is so frequently simulated in the media surrounding Western culture. The encounter with real-life victims of violence forces a reckoning with their motivations and exposes viewers to the raw realities of trauma. The project emerges as an inexorable impasse, not for those who perish within it, but for those burdened by the enduring scars of trauma and violence.
The Final Battle film coincide with wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, both of which have come to normalize accelerated militarization and expanded conflict as a fact of everyday life. Both artistic and cinematic project attempts to contend with this deadly spiral of violence, which has a widespread psychological effect that prevents purposeful articulation and functions to undermine processes of reconciliation and social repair.
