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adamovic.ana@gmail.com

Copyright © Ana Adamovic

The work is set in the half-abandoned interior of Belgrade Staklenac, a shopping and business centre, built on the city’s main square in 1989. Although erected as a temporary structure, for more than three decades Staklenac housed numerous small or large companies, many of which disappeared together with the country in which the mall was built. Today, it lives under the constant and long-lasting threat of being pulled down to be replaced with an opera house, a contemporary art gallery, and a green area. In this work it briefly becomes a scene where a children’s choir performs parts of the cantata A Humble Song to the Birds by British composer Antony Hopkins. Hopkins wrote the cantata for one high adult voice. Now children, who traditionally represent the voice and symbol of the future, are invited to perform....

The Corridor narrates about the apparent void created by the flow of time, and the nausea that void is causing. For nearly eight hours the work follows a single scene - a hospital corridor. The corridor is empty, illuminated by the existing, hospital neon lighting. While the picture depicts only one, almost invariable scene, noises come from the hospital rooms, ancillary rooms, distant parts of the hospital, suggesting that the complete peace and emptiness of the corridor can be disturbed at any moment. There is no natural light source in the hallway to indicate the arrival of a new day, thus the only landmark for time is the large hospital clock that is constantly ticking while accurately marking passage of every single second. Thus, in the work time becomes the main protagonist, its flow the only certainty, and waiting the only activity....

Wunderkammer questions a possibility of understanding the past, even the very recent one, the one we have a partial memory on, in a present where historical narratives are constantly employed as foundations identities, alliances or conflicts are built upon. The work problematizes the very idea of history’s transparency and intelligibility while questioning its meaning when reduced to a series of more or less visually appealing and almost static images accompanied by nothing more than mechanical sounds or incomprehensible voices with no clearly constructed narrative or a comment which is always written in and by the present. ...

The work questions (self)representational politics of the Museum of African Art founded in 1977 in Belgrade, then the capital of socialist Yugoslavia and one of the leading actors in the Non-aligned movement. It problematize the colonial gaze in the collection displayed in a country with no colonial experience, and politics of representation of artifacts both gathered and offered for pleasure and valorization to the white Europeans. ...

Theme park is an on-going photographic visual research into tourism as a global phenomenon. The artist is a tourist herself, thus the photographs from the series are created only during her travels, while visiting amusement or water parks, beaches or numerous touristic attractions - no matter if the “attraction” happens to be an art exhibition or a roller coaster. As a tourist, the artist photographs an image the world offers to her while turning into the theme park....

In 1943, Hannah Arendt wrote the text We Refugees dedicated to the exiled and exterminated European Jews. In the moment of probably the biggest refugee crisis happening on the European soil after the end of the Second World War, the video installation We Refugees is taking that text for its starting point, while trying to question the notions of war, intolerance, exile, responsibility and solidarity. ...

Six channel digital slide projection with sound (181 photographs and texts from photo-albums sent to Josip Broz Tito from 1945 till 1980; from the archive of the Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade)...

Installation with 46 pots of the selected plants | Installation with take-a-way posters and archive photograph from the archive of the Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade...

The Choir focuses on the performative characteristics of the photographic medium and its role within the society of (socialist) spectacle. Slide projection is accompanied by the sound of piano playing the popular song from the socialist period celebrating work, the song that was part of the repertoire of (almost) every school performance around Yugoslavia for years....

There is at least one photograph of a choir in almost every album that Tito ever received from the children of Yugoslavia. Accordingly, the album that the Pioneers and Youths of the Institute for the Education of Deaf Children in Zagreb sent to the President on his birthday in 1962 duly contains a photograph of their school choir. The photograph features 14 children singing onstage, with their conductor in front of them and a banner saying ‘Živio Dan mladosti’ (Long live Youth Day) in the background. This photograph is the starting and visual reference point in Two Choirs....