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HERE COMES THE DARKNESS, October 29-December 18, 2011, ISU Galleries, University of Illinois at Normal.

Photographic, sculptural and video works housed in a collapsable labyrinth structure organized around the Minotaur, a black cube that responds to electrostatic charge. At the center of the black minimal object, comprised entirely of metal-coated audio tape, resides a Van de Graaf generator, producing a charge that is distributed by visitors moving though the sculpture. In this process, electrostatics animate and distort the sculpture itself, paralleled by an audio transmission that is generated by the charge. Like the Domus Dedali of Greek myth, the piece is lingering with potential, made visceral through the skin. Mountains Will Give, Recital, Black Matter  and Open-Form/Welt-Schmerz (2011) are photographic works designed for the Minotaur, acting as portals, diagrams, and apparitions that repeat throughout the sections of the exhibition structure and foreshadow the video works.

ARTFORUM REVIEW by Claudine Ise.

On September 25 2008, George Bush and Barack Obama gave an emergency speech after the American stock markets crashed. Broadcasters, like CNN, had to break out of the regular TV format to accommodate for the length of the speech(the 2 extra minutes). The editing of this video corresponds exactly to CNN news broadcast leading up to, including and after the speech. Every editorial and commercial cut is in synch. The fades denote three or more pundits simultaneously commenting on the events unfolding. The image-less part of the video (where the audience is encouraged to close their eyes and make a film with the sound provided) is the speech itself.
This work is comprised of landscape shots from Iraqi abandoned American bases, streets of Cairo, Egypt, gardens outside Munich where Hitler took daily walks and various architectural imagery from Serbia, Switzerland and the United States.
The sand storms of sound transmit to the gardens and lakes of the west condensating the fogs of ruin. Struck by a beam of darkness, ancient friendships and suicide pacts convulse, trapped in perpetual present where dust covers all in the pace of television.

This record is a soundtrack for Djinn & Tonic, a film installation. The LP has a labyrinth etched on one side. As the recording is played one traverses a labyrinth since the etching makes the record skip.

The League of Dark Departments have joined forces in forming the Gesture Guild, a bureau for the recovery and acquisition of lost gestures. The Gesture Guild aims to return and reinforce the primordial anxieties responsible for head-bending weight and other liquid spiraling disasters, topical and tropical.
The public, inflicted with recession-based involuntary movement, nervous twitches, and ticks, due to the loss of solid surfaces and time-space incongruity, can join various Guild programs in search of gravitational re-calibration.

FOLLOW ME SAILORS!

WHOEVER TOLD YOU

THERE IS NO TRUE, 
FAITHFUL

AND ETERNAL SEA?

MAY HIS BLISTERING TONGUE BE CUT OUT!

FOLLOW ME, MY SAILORS, AND ONLY ME,

AND I WILL SHOW YOU SUCH A SEA!

A march composed for Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, modeled after a Yugoslav communist work song, I'm gonna kill myself over your dead body if you fuck anybody but me, a parody about the bourgeois passion of Romeo and Juliet.  The chorus repeats the line, changing it slightly every time. The lines are broken by strophes of disaster and shipwreck. The score is for a choir of sailors and minimum of 4 drummers, led by a single female voice.

This series tarted in the “Belgrade Institute for the Mentally Insane”, where I interned to portray patients whose illness was attributed to the 1990’s wars in the Balkans. Not allowed and interested to show their faces realistically, I manipulated the images to create surrealist “floating heads”, citing the portraits of the insane and guillotined heads by Théodore Géricault. The portraits are harmnized with instances of formal exception and imperfection as indexed by Danil Kharms (a yellow cable in the middle of a green field) and inforced by instances of insanity lingering in the memory of a landcape ( vistas that Hitler saw during his daily walks around Munich).

A photographic study of formally analogous sites from Serbia and the American midwest. The images from Serbia depict multiple sites of radiation exposure and the resulting botanical "no-grow" zones that followed the 1999 NATO bombing. All that remains is a new breed of mutated weeds, impervious to chemical eradication, reminiscent of  the abandoned Detroit housing ruins, parking lots, and shopping malls--monuments to vanishing economies. Together with the video work Here Comes The Darkness this project aims to establish a formal connection between the sites of military desolation in Iraq, Serbia and archetypes of American urban sprawl in recession. The general feeling of decline in urbanist forms from the American dream and its logical end in the sprawling suburbs and abandoned strips to the imagining of disasters when such aesthetic establishes itself in the devastated Iraq cities, abandoned American military bases and radiated serbian crop fields. The abandoned parking lot serves as a basic typology of the new ruined landscape and appears to be one of the political exports of contemporary warfare.The complete image series include sites of unexploded bombs in Serbia, where the national solution to lack of funding for deactivation and removal led to covering of sited with deep concrete blocks and building permanent structures above them: new megamalls, playgrounds, appartmrnts and kindergartens rest atop the expired bombs.

A newspaper archive of semi-fictional set of narratives re-telling the deaths of conceptualism's greats as recent Belgrade narco-mafia assassination and kidnappings. The text creates a kind of serial killing spree aimed against the white men of minimal and conceptual art (Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt...) before their arrival to the opening of the first major international survey of conceptual art When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harold Szeeman for Kunsthalle Berne in 1969.  The exhibit never takes place since the key artists get killed before ever making their work or on their way to Bern (feminist outcome since the exhibit featured 66 men and only 2 women--Eva Hesse and Jo Ann Kaplan). The humor ceases when the methods of killing are exposed as direct translations form Serbian contemporary daily newspapers. 

Dynamic flickering neon projection intended for public facades. This work is a sentance-based manifesto.

A reenaction of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shinning in the empty hallways of Chicago’s Field Museum. The main protagonist, a little girl on a tricycle, is chased through the natural museum’s vaults and dioramas by an infernal He, modeled after Mephistopheles. At the MCA, five slide projectors orchestrated this journey in a slide program, juxtaposed to a “summit” of canes in a curiosity cabinet structure.

The performance reenacted, with the MCA audience, the fictional black magic act by Professor Woland  at the Soviet Variety Theater from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. A silent drummer mounted on a conference table signified potential surprise and a secret promise.  The audience played the theatre audience from the novel, reading from the screen, a numbered text they were given upon entering.

360 degree floor-to-ceiling wallpaper panorama of the entrance and the interior of the secret vault of diplomatic presents belonging to Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito. All images were taken covertly and achieved by bribery, allowing the audience a corollary access into a sepulcher of 20th century’s ideological failures.

A two-part installation compositing 19th century phantasmagoric display and contemporary signifiers of horror. The title alludes to the term for the moment before waking, when imagination confuses the vivid dream state for reality. The fantasy and dream narratives mesh, their rules and permeability overlap and nightmares come to life. The work, concieved in 2008, has been installed for the first time in this winter.

A project for the sludge metal band the Melvins, a double LP cover for an exhibit curated by Bod Nickas. The cover was etched into black aluminum and manipulated by the Melvins during their performance at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles by a pile of amplifiers strong enough to bend the metal (the sound and kicks crumpled the aluminium sheet). The remainder was scanned for the  Melvins  to create an LP based on the names constructed for the tracks.  The names were etched on the drawing’s grid: BRAIN, BLOOD, BLOOMS.

A school group visits a Belgrade ZOO albino boa constrictor, one of the animal survivors of NATO 1999 bombing campaign. The snake outlasted the elephant in adjacent cage like the boa in Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, as the final chapter of the book subtitles the video.  This work creates parallel narrative between the devastating forces of war and recession through the ruins of Belgrade’s Military Headquarters and Detroit’s Michigan Central Station.

A parallel track record (record with random track selections)  embodies a fractured and disoriented narrative timeline (like a nightmare). The record (On Being Buried Alive) is a sleep program narrative.  In 2008, a physical dormitory for fifteen people was produced and can be sent to any venue for a sleep event.  At AUDO Conference (2008), blankets, pillows and military sleep mats were shipped to the project site and installed through a set of instructional posters.  The package also supplied the parallel-track narrative, The Oath overhead slide, and a light owl extension for the record player projecting the night skies. The audience gathered, occupied the dormitory, the lights were turned off and the program played to lull them to sleep.

This score was created for dark caves and working mines.  Designed to test the limits of the french horn instrument, this work can be performed by only by Giovanni Punto, Dennis Brain and Barry Tuckwell in its entirety. Since it requires two resurrections (Brain and Punto) Diaboliad stipulates a Satanic pact.  The editions are printed with ash cartridge and once the score dries it is smeared each time it is touched, staining the hands of the reader black.

Black Sail is based on a real-time transmission of a cargo ship voyage to the middle of the Atlantic ocean via H.C. Anderson’s north pole (mid-distance between New York and Nikola Tesla’s birth home in present-day Croatia).

This work, conceived as a ongoing collaboration with University of Chicago Department of Astrophysics, functions as an annual index of all galaxies imploding since the work was first exhibited in 2006.  Especially pertinent in a time of recession and disaster, recently the editions were developed into personal one-offs, where annual editions can be ordered corresponding the year of worst personal failure by the person purchasing the work.  The edition is sent flat and crumpled into a pile by the collector and hidden away to gather dust and ruin.