Artist: Milica Mijajlović

Title: Through trepidations of her soul, her passion and torments

You are sitting on the bus, listening to random tracks thinking basically about everything and nothing at the same time. Landscape is changing and suddenly you hear that one song, the one you were listening to twenty years ago, and you didn’t even understand the words but you understood the pain; and the pain it was real and it was omnipresent. And the love was pain and it was impossible.

“Through trepidations of her soul, her passion and torments” is a poetic scenery that talks mostly trough symbols and the atmosphere but also trough the narratives in videos and texts. My attempt was to focus on the subject trough representation of emotions and states of someone who is predestined to identify as a victim. Here I was focusing mostly on love life in reality where love is almost absent based on my own experience and memories of growing up in the society which was constantly falling apart. Trough this space installation my attempt was to represent an atmosphere of constant battle between identification with the trauma and overcoming it.

The space is evoking and resembling ones own intimate space. It looks like as a bedroom with some elements of celebration. As if group of people came for afterparty drinks in the bedroom where you spent 20 days crying. It is a space full of contrasts with the softness and comfort of the bed on one side and roughness of the fence and the another. The idea of the bed as an object with ambivalent meaning; which harms and protects at a same time and sometimes feels like home but sometimes like a battlefield. Video works presented on the bedsheets are primarily visual representations that reflect different moods and states usually triggered by particular memories and past moments which are important in defining an identity. The work itself is a multimedia collage that often begins with an impulse from the past, coming out from the layers subconsciousness. Those spontaneous impulses I later process, and contextualise in words, sentences and images which are defining a work as a poetical visual confession. Theoretical part of the work was based on a research about young women identity in the society which is falling apart, as it was in Serbia from 1993 when I was born till now. I was focusing on socio-economical factors but also culture/subculture that was present back then. The life that was devastated in almost every dimension was glorifying fun and entertainment as the only pillar that was not possible to ruin but was constantly and strongly build, based on distorted values where woman was presented as entertainer, as queen but also as a victim of love and victim of men.