Lightness of memory and weight of experience, 2015
Installation – granite panel, photographs/ dimensions variable
(Photographs from the archive of the Museum of Yugoslav History and artist’s personal archive)
- The work is conceived as an installation with the selection of 112 black and white photographs from the archive of photographic albums that children from all around Yugoslavia were sending to president Tito.
- On the opposite wall from the photographs from the Museum’s archive positioned is a color photograph 2×2 m large from the artist’s personal archive featuring a group portrait taken during his childhood in socialism.
- The black granite panel leans onto the printed color photograph. Dimensions of the panel are 55x180x3 cm and its weight 91kg, the same as the artists’ current weight.
- A multitude of the group portraits from the Museum’s archive makes a parallel to the portrait from the private archive as an equivalent of collective and the personal memory.
- In her novel “Patterns of the Childhood” Christa Wolf wrote: “Past is easier to invent than to remember”. This sentence could also be expressed in a way that the past is more difficult to bear as a fact than it is to remember!
Mladen Miljanović was born in Zenica in 1981. After the secondary school he attended the Reserve Officer School where he earned the rank of a sergeant. As a sergeant he trained 30 privates. After completion of the military term he enrolled at the Academy of Arts (Department of Painting, BA – MA) in Banja Luka. Lives and works in Banja Luka.