SINIŠA ILIĆ

AFTERMATHS
2008
15 drawings on paper, felt-tip pens, dimensions 36 x 41 cm each

The content of Aftermath drawings is post-explicit: the main event is evacuated, our gaze as witness is already late. We can find traces, remnants, crumbs of action that are left, or that always existed, as leftovers from the feast of images already selected for us.
Through the classical visual art medium, non-explicit content of the drawings activates the field of political battle. Everyday intolerance or discriminations become visible at the moment when finally the opposite values are about to start their life and development.
Aftermaths does not refer to or represent mythologized or, on the other hand, undefined past of violence and tortures inside the history of totalitarian or democratic societies - favorite pro/re/gressive epochs. Rather, they are focused on recent times. Scenes fill up a vast and eternal present, spectacles of violence or similar showdowns dressed up in recognizable texture of contemporary image. It is possible to recognize contemporariness through models of neo-bureaucratic procedures, utopistically balanced egalitarianism between chosen characters/figures/roles on the drawings and through their association or similarities with media images, multiplied and spread all over.
Aftermath is a frieze without beginning or end, simple, still, and silent. The place where action takes place is the white world, the egalitarian societies.
(S.I.)

SINIŠA ILIĆ (1977, Belgrade, SB) graduated at the Painting Department of the Belgrade Faculty of Fine Art. Member and co-founder of TkH (Walking Theory, http://www.tkh-generator.net ), independent art and theory platform, and TkH magazine, based in Belgrade. Co-author and performer of several text-based performances. Together with theatre director Bojan Djordjev, he started a long-term project Desert of Picture in 2002. Selected participant of the Drawing Center Viewing Program in New York. In 2006 he was an artists in residence at ISCP, New York and during 2004-2005 at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Selected exhibitions include Beyond Theory, WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Reconstruction (with Tina Gverović), Kontekst Gallery and MKM, Belgrade; Drunk on Dreams, Fruehsorge Galerie, Berlin; Off-Center Femininities, Windows at the Kimmel Center, New York University, New York; Tracing Love (with Milica Simonović), Zvono Gallery, Belgrade; Inquiry into Reality: Disappearance of Public Space, Salon of Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Near Dark, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. He is based in Belgrade.