Artist: Milica Mijajlović

Title: You Smell of Sleep and Tears

Venue: City Surfer Office, Prague

You smell of sleep and tears
It blooms but it stabs
With its sharp peaks and edges
it scratches, and slits and shears
and unexpectedly caresses.
It pulls you apart,
and tears your flesh,
It slashes and slits and cuts,
and ties your wounds with orchids.
You lie there swollen,
and tiered and blessed,
You smell of sleep and tears,
and wait for it to pass.

Milica Mijajlovic lives and works in Prague but was born in Belgrade in 1993 – during the height of the Yugoslav Wars – and this seems to be one of the keys to read her current exhibition. With the project You Smell of Sleep and Tears Milica examines the memories she’s had to leave behind yet which inevitably affected her identity. A series of abstract paintings retain qualities both soft and brute and they could be seen both as shadows of ghosts lurking from the aching past as well as wounds in the process of healing – captured on velvet canvas in a point of time between the hurtful tear and healed solid skin. The video provides us with a collection of memories but there is no voice to associate the subtitles with. It could be an
out-of-sync translation of the lyrics of the heartbreaking song, but maybe it’s just a transcript of wandering mind coping with images of a lost home. “I am trying to locate the relations between the world of love and the world trauma, how these two phenomenons reflect to each other, how they communicate and how they very often create a hybrid I’m unable to define.

Milica Mijajlovic (*1993) studies at the Department of Fine Arts at The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in class of Michal Novotny and Jiri Cernicky. Her artistic practice focuses mostly on
painting, but recently she has been working within other media, such as text, objects and performance. In her work she reflects dominantly to the personal world of memory, connecting it with actual issues and referring
to it through the language of symbols. With a lack of narrative she is reflecting to certain dimensions of trauma, sentiment and spectacle, depicting the intensity, the tension, and the glory of particular events and
conditions.