Video Installatons
- A Film Projected on a Graveyard; A Film Found in the Scrapyard (2025)
projected on the Logan Center main building part of the EXPANDED CINEMA: PROXIMITY outdoor projection installation.
- You can never tell what you might be filming (2025)
exhibited in Chicago, USA (Logan Center for the Arts - The University of Chicago).
- The world revolves around the sun? (2025)
exhibited in Chicago, USA (Logan Center for the Arts - The University of Chicago).
You can never tell what you might be filming (2025)
exhibited in Chicago, USA (Logan Center for the Arts - The University of Chicago).
Two video channels run concurrently (the first projected on a 1980s RCA TV, the second a wall), each reflecting on the difficulty of apprehending evidentiary truth.
In the physical installation, a pair of headphones is connected to the older television set, which broadcasts its own audio commentary--the same voice now heard over the digital versions of the work reproduced here.
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The film camera remains beholden to time, to a material duration that resists the quixotic acceleration demanded by the internet. The time to develop and scan film has not yet collapsed into instantaneity; it still insists upon delay, upon the quiet work of waiting. But what becomes of the footage when time itself overtakes its meaning--when the subject transforms? When, one day, you film a Russian hockey player, and a few years later that same athlete appears in uniform, a member of the Ukrainian defense forces?
A Film Projected on a Graveyard; A Film Found in the Scrapyard (2025)
projected on the Logan Center main building part of the EXPANDED CINEMA: PROXIMITY outdoor projection installation.
I was preoccupied by a more metaphysical proximity: that between the living and the dead.
In the former Yugoslavia, one often heard the saying, “O pokojniku sve najbolje” -- speak only good of the dead. But who determines the proper interval after which we may return to history with a critical gaze? We are told to wait until a figure has passed to assess their life, yet it is precisely the dead whose lives become most bitterly contested; and it is the dead who imprison the living.
When we act in the present, are we truly guided by contemporary urgencies, or merely carrying out the unfinished imperatives of the deceased?
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No short video installation can possibly account for 9/11 and its innumerable causes. But I believed it might be possible to juxtapose our hyper-spectacular age with the gravity of genuine tragedy. This was my point. Half of the title--those attentive may have noticed--was borrowed from Godard’s Weekend (1967), a film that foresaw our present condition: a world in which catastrophe exists only as spectacle.
The recent shipping disaster in Brooklyn, and the manner in which passersby responded--with the reflex to film rather than to aid--crystallizes our dilemma.
We must ask: do we document, or do we mourn?
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The opportunity to exhibit work upon such a historically and politically charged structure is unlikely to come again.
This installation experiments with a form I call “archives of the imagined.” Rather than treating the archive as a static repository of the past -- an impenetrable vault of “dead facts”-- I wished to animate it, to transform the past from a distant object of study into a haunting and imminent presence. The aim was to resist the slow corrosion of collective memory and the contemporary tendency to regard history as an isolated or novel event.
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In conceiving this work, I thought of the archive as a kind of message in a bottle--not one cast toward the future, but sent instead to the present. Its fragments drift back to us as reminders, reawakening our sense of continuity with what has been.
The project was partly inspired by Antonio Negri’s critiques of Giorgio Agamben, which led me to his work Remnants of Auschwitz.
Agamben’s reflections on bare life and the figure of the witness deeply resonated with my own engagement with testimony, silence, and image.
Equally formative were the writings of David Harvey, particularly his articulation of the right to the city. Just as Harvey questions who holds the authority to define the rights of urban citizens, I sought to interrogate who determines the visibility of history--who possesses the power to obscure genealogies and traces of ongoing social crises, often to fetishize or neutralize them for ideological or aesthetic ends.