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The variety of perspectives was the starting point for the installation “Oligoptica” by the Serbian-American artist Branislav (Slav) Jankic, presented to the audience at the 2022 Art Market Budapest .
Contrary to the principle of the panopticon, a central observation point from which all other areas are comprehensible, Branislav´’s work rather was rather examining the diversity of many 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 were based on the artist’s anthropological studies and his interest in the different relationships of power and the associated questions of submission and domination.
As a child, Branislav Jankic left his hometown of Vukovar in the turmoils of the 1990s. After refugee stops in Germany, work and education in Italy and the USA, Branislav today lives and creates in Berlin and New York.
The 2022 Art Market Budapest was putting a special spotlight on artists from Serbia and together with Slav´s body of work we were showing narratives of contemporary Serbian art, a certain “all-enompassing oligoptic summary, that go beyond borders of Serbia and the Balkans in general.
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 tumult 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 and Jan Gustav Fiedler
Curators
Power and Body >> Parnass Kunstmagazin
Eroticism is the last remaining space of freedom >> Danas
Like any good tower, this one will inevitably fall as well >> BURO
Dreamwalking and rusty scaffolding >> 24 Sedam
