Artist Drives Home New Message in Old Zastavas

On October 23, the opening day of his three-week exhibition at the National Art Gallery, the 29-year-old artist gave out his cell phone number and offered to drive people for free to see it.

“Artists must find ways to fill the empty space between the public and cultural intuitions… we must create an audience for ourselves, or our work is meaningless,” Miljanovic said.

The car he drives is itself an exhibit. One of the best-selling vehicles in the former Yugoslavia, the Zastava 101 was produced from the early 1970s until two years ago in Kragujevac, Serbia. Over the years its original design never changed.
 
Once in the gallery, Miljanovic takes his guests round and answers questions about his work.

At first sight, Miljanovic's exhibition is all about the Zastava 101, the butt of many jokes about its poor quality but also a source of pride in Yugoslavia when it started selling abroad in the 1970s, including to some West European countries.
 
On one of the gallery walls is a row of headrests removed from the cars, each connected to an invisible speake replaying the story of a person who had first-hand experience of a Zastava 101.
 
Mounted on another wall is a bonnet with the words “Land for Sale” and a phone number, along with a photo of its original resting place alongside a road leading to Banja Luka, where Miljanovic lives.
 
The exhibition is not really about the car, he explains.
“Because its design never changed, I use this car as a metaphor for some other problems… like the stagnation of thought, social stagnation,” Miljanovic explains.

A row of seat belts taken from Zastava 101 cars and attached to a gallery wall, accompanied by a drawing of a small tree with a bent trunk, tied loosely to a straight stake, is another metaphor.

The drawing – a symbol of orthopedic medicine – points to a message.  “Art and culture are orthopedic in their nature… when you go to a gallery, a theatre or a cinema you return home with new knowledge; sometimes your opinion changes, you are enriched,” Miljanovic says.

“Artists are like a rope which ties society to the straight stake of cultural institutions in order to correct its deformities.”

If cultural institutions are deformed, which is “not unusual in societies like ours”, artists must “play the role both of the rope and the stake”, he said.

Miljanovic believes artists can initiate social change, and the way he does it is by re-examining and re-contextualising his own distressing experiences.

In his first major 2006-2007 project, called “I Serve Art”, Miljanovic confined himself to a disused military barracks in Banja Luka for nine months, reliving his equally long 2001 compulsory military service and “changing the identity of the place”.

After the first six months of his military service, Miljanovic earned the rank of senior sergeant and for the following three months had to train 30 new recruits.

In the deserted barracks in Banja Luka, he restored 30 army helmets he bought at a military junkyard and turned them into flowerpots for an installation he called “Culture in Helmets.”

“It was important to plant a seed of life in those helmets because I was planting completely different things in the heads of the 30 recruits I trained; I planted knowledge about military tactics and weapons,” Miljanovic said.

Miljanovic sees his self-imposed isolation in the barracks as a turning point. But he identifies his “bravest” project as the 2005 “Happening Balkana”, organised with the UDAS Gallery in Banja Luka, which among other things exhibits the works of artists with disabilities.

Miljanovic invited 12 Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs who had lost limbs in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war to join him at a lake for a four-day art colony. He told the men, some of whom had not left their homes since losing a limb, that while they were not really artists, their artwork would be exhibited. The only thing he did not tell them was that the event was meant to gather former foes.

“It was a high-risk project and nobody wanted to finance it because it involved people who lost limbs fighting each other,” Miljanovic recalled.

But the men were so occupied with their efforts to make the best possible art that “they unconsciously became friends and today they call each other on the phone to chat.

“It is not enough for art to identify the problem…it has to offer solutions, even if they are considered utopian,” Miljanovic believes.

“An artist has to plant the seed and let society nurture it… every one of us has an obligation to work for positive change in our society, we must all be involved”.

Miljanovic’s socially engaged art is attracting growing international attention. His latest international achievement was a solo exhibition at Vienna’s MUMOK Museum of Modern Art, which closed on October 12. Previously, his works have been displayed in other museums and art galleries around the globe.

Miljanovic dismisses notions of fame and prefers to see what he does as a social responsibility, including to his parents who taught him that “hate is wrong”.

Several close relatives, including an uncle and aunt, were killed during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which he spent in the family home in the central town of Doboj, only metres from the frontline.

“Still, I was raised to believe that hate is wrong and I am grateful to my parents because they understood that to hate others is a politically imposed ‘value’,” Miljanovic said.

 “I have an obligation to my parents, to myself, to the people around me, my country,” he concluded. “An artist cannot change the world but we can change individual people, one by one.”

This article is funded under the BICCED project, supported by the Swiss Cultural Programme.