Radenko Milak is a young artist from Banja Luka with a distinguished international career who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2017 with the project ‘Universe of Disaster’. For the exhibition at MSU, Radenko Milak will produce completely new series of drawings, large composite murals and scenes as well as several new film animations. This will be their first showing.
Radenko Milak is a young artist from Banja Luka with a distinguished international career who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2017 with the project ‘Universe of Disaster’. He has intrigued the world museum and gallery scene with his fascinating black and white watercolours with motifs mainly taken from the world of documentary photography. However, Milak did not stop at photographs only. For the Zagreb exhibition, he will prepare several animated films created by using the method of painting individual frames taken from already existing film documents and live-action films. Since the early 2000s, Milak has been developing his skills in the watercolour technique, as well as focusing on large world disasters, wars, global ecological crises, key social and cultural events etc., and he finds his motifs in photographs, mostly documentary photographs, in daily and periodical press, various online photographic archives and in historical and contemporary book and magazine editions.
For the exhibition at MSU, Radenko Milak will produce completely new series of drawings, large composite murals and scenes as well as several new film animations. This will be their first showing. The exhibition will primarily deal with the topic of political and social history of ‘European failures’ marked by the events of the second half of the 19th century, the turbulent 20th century and the chaotic beginning of the 21st century. This will be the author’s representation of the history of social and political upheavals, world and national wars and conflicts, economic transitions and crises as well as inequalities as consequences of the rule of capitalism in the last century and a half, which have, of course, been recorded in photography and film, either documentary or live-action.
Radenko Milak has decided, for solely conceptual reasons, to make his drawings black and white, which makes them highly reminiscent of their photographic and film models. This conscious media mimesis, this conversion of media and the choice of topics have enabled the artist to enhance the meaning of the message originally recorded in these technical media that, as we know, record the reality in the most objective way. His works are well above simply copying, and any resemblance to the original is in fact ‘coincidental’. This is about the procedure of repeating, representing the forgotten or invisible reality anew, which gives his works a strong and authentic visual sensation. Transferring the message from the past to the present and from a mechanical to a manual medium has made it entirely topical and it makes us, contemporaries, revise the paradigms whose aesthetic, and often ethical criteria have been changed in time, which makes them open to re-reading, that is, to the process of confirmation or re-evaluation, by today's public. Here, in Milak’s extremely convincing painting transfer, it seems as if the original (original model) in the mechanical media of photography and film never even existed and it seems that we have before us an entirely recent event, although his sources generally date back decades.
Curator: Tihomir Milovac
