Easttopics is proud to present Milica Mijajlović’s first solo exhibition in Hungary as a result of the young artist’s residency in Budapest. Featuring her most recent paintings on textile as well as objects and a video piece realized specifically for this show, the project explores the artist’s reminiscences about the Yugoslav war, more precisely about the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 that she experienced as a small child. The flashes of the explosions that she first innocently misinterpreted as fireworks constitute the central motif of her works, which conceptualize – both in their symbolic content and in their technical characteristics – the swirling confusion and antithetic emotions felt ever since by the artist in the apprehension of this traumatic period.
This disconcerting bitter sweet characteristic of her present practice further unfolds in objects combining used, dirty wheel trims and forms made of caramelized sugar that evoke sharp serrated blades or elaborated fire arms. The artist’s new video work explores her equally ambivalent relation to Serbian turbo-folk music and its flashy, latex-dressed performers who became national stars during the nineties, the Milošević regime and the Yugoslav war.
Therefore, not only does Milica Mijajlović deal with her individual war trauma, but also tackles a phenomena all of us can relate to; the embellishment of childhood experiences – should they be related to food, music, clothing, visual culture or more concretely perturbing events such as international conflicts – and the disillusive reflection, critical processing of these memories as a necessary operation to become adult.