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adamovic.ana@gmail.com

Copyright © Ana Adamovic

30 Nov

Posted at 11:05h in Works

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....

27 Dec

Posted at 20:12h in Works

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....

27 Dec

Posted at 19:59h in Works

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. ...

27 Dec

Posted at 19:30h in Works

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. ...

19 Oct

Posted at 10:26h in Works

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....

19 Oct

Posted at 10:33h in Works

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. ...

19 Oct

Posted at 11:07h in Works

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)...

19 Oct

Posted at 06:57h in Works

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...

19 Oct

Posted at 06:34h in Works

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....

19 Oct

Posted at 06:41h in Works

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....

19 Oct

Posted at 06:19h in Works

In April 1987, Kolibri, the famous children’s choir, held a concert in Kolarac concert hall in Belgrade. On that occasion, former members of the choir present in the audience joined the choir on the stage to perform the last two songs together, which was a unique situation in the choir’s history. One of the songs they were singing was My Country is the Most Beautiful of All. Four years after the concert, a war in Yugoslavia broke up. It was the biggest European conflict after the Second World War with more than 130.000 people killed. 24 years after the concert, 20 years after the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia, some of the former Kolibri members reunited to sing the song once again in the same city, but a completely different country than was in 1987....

18 Nov

Posted at 14:14h in Works

The old lady is watching, concentrated, while listening to her own voice, singing one of her most favorite songs from youth. She heard it first back in the 1941. It is on Italian. About the soldier writing to his mother from the front, telling her how much he misses her. How he will never leave her again if he makes it through the war. Her voice, the song, is a tool to recreate the past. Both personal and collective. Her portrait is an image – at the same time personal and universal - of an old age, of memory and leaving....

18 Oct

Posted at 13:54h in Works

After the Second World War, generations were raised with the iconic image of children who fought in the war against fascism. That is true not only for the Former Yugoslavia, but many countries around the world. Taking as a point of departure question what could be a vision of the future a society is offering to the young generations while raising them with images and narratives about children warriors who sacrificed their lives for their country, the work is exploring one possible image of childhood....

18 Oct

Posted at 13:50h in Works

The assumption that a veiled woman can not be free is so deeply rooted in the Western mind that we often don't even consider the fact that the act of veiling is in many circles today almost equally revolutionary as unveiling was in the first half of the last century. Today, a woman of the Islamic religion is a victim of double discrimination – by gender and by religion. As a religion and the way of life, Islam is under influence of the great number of political and other factors and is becoming the no. 1 media topic. As such it communicates via numerous possible interpretations, stereotypes and representations. This work tries to eliminate the media and whatever existing filter and through a direct conversation with women of Islamic religion from city of Novi Pazar, Serbia, reveal a small part of their world....

18 Nov

Posted at 13:34h in Works

Video work Postcards from Imaginary Places is dealing with the fragility of the memory and the struggle to remember. Images showing sudden memory flashes represent seen but not quite familiar places, events one feels are experienced but can not grasp their totality, can not place them in any consecutive narrative. The backdrop for that struggle with one’s memory in the work is the water – waste and indifferent sea that maybe remembers everything....

18 Oct

Posted at 13:05h in Works

Human memory is quite fragile; many experiments proved that it is possible to construct memories about things that have never happened, or places never visited. Postcards from Imaginary Places are about that fragility. Photographic images are showing seen but not quite familiar places, places one cannot really prove to have a real memory about....

18 Oct

Posted at 13:37h in Works

The mechanism of memory is still not fully explained, there are numerous and complex traces leading us to our personal memories. Works from the Madeleine series (started in 2004) are trying to explore images that are representing or could represent memory triggers. Through photographs and video works author opens the possibility for different interpretations of individual and collective images of the past. ...

14 Oct

Posted at 06:20h in Works

Having on mind Western perception of the Balkans and taking author’s own Balkan origin as a point of departure, the project represents a visual research of the region. Photographs were taken by plastic camera that transforms objects and places photographed into dream-like images, thus reflecting the image that has been for centuries constructed in the Western world - the one of exoticization, romanticization and othering. Using this photographing method, author is trying to research into that exotic image constructed around the notion of the Balkans....

17 Apr

Posted at 11:48h in Works

Thousands of refugees and asylum seekers are coming to European Union every month, while the Union is constantly making new laws trying to restrict this massive flow of people coming to its Member States. For most of these people, while living in their native countries, Western Europe was seen as a dreamland of prosperity and freedom. Once in their “dreamland” they are confronted with a different reality: their moving is highly restricted except from one to another asylum house, they have virtually no money, in most cases they don’t understand language of the country they came to. Most of the time they spend sitting and waiting for their asylum procedure to be finalized - to be granted stay or forced to leave, for their lives to continue....