sound from the site-specific installation, a diorama set in the Museum of Aviation Belgrade, 2018
Audio to a diorama containing a scene of a plane slowly but certainly plunging into the jungle’s lush canopies. The work is about escapism, failed expectations, anxiety. It’s about the feeling that something very bad and fatal will happen suddenly, when least expected. It also evokes the human state of inability to recognize their true desires, to tell right from wrong.
It is the ultimate memento mori set in the jungle, most potent tropical vanitas.
It happened probably somewhere by the end of the 1980s, in my early childhood. I remember watching the video for David Bowie’s song China girl. While watching it, for the first time ever, I knowingly grasped the feeling of eroticism: excitingly seductive, sweet and alluringly dangerous.
The audio-video installation The first time in my life that I have ever knowingly grasped erotic sensation thanks to MTV: David Bowie, China girl examines the content of the notion of sentimentality and the attitude towards it in the fatalistic times that we are living in which is not too far from baroque understanding of the term: sentimentality is a feeling that we get from confronting the world that is fading or that has already died.
The temporality of memories, their fragility affected by time passing are present through the usage of analogue TV, unexpected glitches and burnt colours of the image reproduced in VHS technology, materialized recollections of the photonic scene that had been remembered in childhood. The installation is simultaneously an homage to sentimentality’s nonjudgmental innocence and ironic criticism of it.
