Title
Oligoptica
Date
2022
Medium
Steel tower with lights and CRT monitors, arranged as a five-channel video installation with sound.
Dimensions
15 x 5 x 5 feet (4.5 m x 1.05 m x 1.05 m0 (Hight x Width x Depth)
To watch the documentation of the tower
Click on the image︎︎︎
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ABOUT THE PROJECT
Oligoptica
Date
2022
Medium
Steel tower with lights and CRT monitors, arranged as a five-channel video installation with sound.
Dimensions
15 x 5 x 5 feet (4.5 m x 1.05 m x 1.05 m0 (Hight x Width x Depth)
To watch the documentation of the tower
Click on the image︎︎︎
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The variety of perspectives is the starting point of the installation "Oligoptica" by the Serbian-American artist Branislav (Slav) Jankic. Contrary to the principle of the panopticon, a central observation point from which all other areas are comprehensible, the artist's work rather examines the diversity of possible standpoints and the resulting landscapes of interpretation.
The five video works, stacked on top of each other and integrated into a rusted scaffolding tower, demand an active engagement with the object itself. The works are based on the artist's anthropological studies and his interest in the different relationships of power and the associated questions of submission and domination.
The artist repeatedly places the body itself at the center of his observations - as an instrument of power between humans, as a tool of power of the individual, but also as an instrument that can gain power over oneself. The interrelationships of control are multifaceted in Oligoptica: driven by eroticism (the polylogue in the "Twins" video work), the (self)understanding of the masculine (the handing over of a razor blade, choreographed in "Under Their Watch, I Whisper To Your Lips") or the loss of self-control over one's own body (the dressing scene in "Disobedient"): they all examine, sometimes poetically and sometimes stripped of any unnecessary aesthetics, the body in all of its primal significance.
Branislav is a traveler. Growing up in Borovo Selo near the town of Vukovar, he left his homeland as a child during the turmoil of war in the 1990s. The subsequent biography of the refugee child in Munich, the successful model career in Italy and the USA, the education at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the following international work as an artist is indicative of what we can understand today as "contemporary Serbian art". The zeitgeist of the Serbian art scene is not a matter of national borders. Rather, it summarizes the immigration wave of the last decades, the question of assimilation, the search for identity, rejection, leaving and returning. The Trans-Balkan convolutions and the reflection of the supra-global cultural lattice is in real-time interdependency with what we are experiencing today as the Serbian contemporary art scene.
Denis Leo Hegic & Jan Gustav Fiedler, Curators
The five video works, stacked on top of each other and integrated into a rusted scaffolding tower, demand an active engagement with the object itself. The works are based on the artist's anthropological studies and his interest in the different relationships of power and the associated questions of submission and domination.
The artist repeatedly places the body itself at the center of his observations - as an instrument of power between humans, as a tool of power of the individual, but also as an instrument that can gain power over oneself. The interrelationships of control are multifaceted in Oligoptica: driven by eroticism (the polylogue in the "Twins" video work), the (self)understanding of the masculine (the handing over of a razor blade, choreographed in "Under Their Watch, I Whisper To Your Lips") or the loss of self-control over one's own body (the dressing scene in "Disobedient"): they all examine, sometimes poetically and sometimes stripped of any unnecessary aesthetics, the body in all of its primal significance.
Branislav is a traveler. Growing up in Borovo Selo near the town of Vukovar, he left his homeland as a child during the turmoil of war in the 1990s. The subsequent biography of the refugee child in Munich, the successful model career in Italy and the USA, the education at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the following international work as an artist is indicative of what we can understand today as "contemporary Serbian art". The zeitgeist of the Serbian art scene is not a matter of national borders. Rather, it summarizes the immigration wave of the last decades, the question of assimilation, the search for identity, rejection, leaving and returning. The Trans-Balkan convolutions and the reflection of the supra-global cultural lattice is in real-time interdependency with what we are experiencing today as the Serbian contemporary art scene.
Denis Leo Hegic & Jan Gustav Fiedler, Curators
︎︎︎Created 2022 for the Art Market Budapest and commissioned by Monolog gallery Belgrade.