 |
 |
The exhibition is a video installation replicating a famous Rembrandt painting, while instead of the original doctor characters and Mr Tulp as its centrepiece, we can see past and present politicians of the region complete with Josip Broz Tito.
Igor Bosnjak, 30, uses Rembrandt’s painting called Anatomy lesson, showing a 17th-century social event. A leading anatomist of the age, Nicolaes Tulp, had the right to perform one post-mortem procedure a year and many would pay to attend the Lesson. The painting shows anatomical details so uncannily precise and lifelike that many believed Rembrandt must have copied them from an anatomy textbook.
Bosnjak then makes a three-century leap forward to refer to a sentence from Danilo Kis’ novel Anatomy Lesson that “a doctor knows the human body devoid of spiritual functions, devoid of a soul and morale is a mere digestion machine”. In other words, a man without dignity is one’s own caricature, while Bosnjak’s painting has multiple layers of meaning. The characters in it truly become caricatures as a consequence of what they are saying – incoherent phrases. Together with Tito as doctor Tulp, they are inspecting a dead body – metaphor of a long-gone country.
The exhibition involves another video installation from Bosnjak showing cemeteries, but with monitors showing static instead of tombstones.
Radenko Milak’s work is a series of images as questions and answers, namely “What else have you seen?” and “I could not have seen everything.” It refers to a photograph made by a US photojournalist Ron Haviv at the beginning of the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, showing a Serbian para-military solider kicking a woman lying on the pavement.
The exhibition Existence of Politics is an example of how a social moment in time, which has been lasting for an eternity, can be poured into art with a universal question: is there an end to human stupidity, condescension and arrogance?
|
 |
 |
|