Issue # 28 Radenko Milak
Curated by: Christopher Yggdre
Dreaming of Prey to Grasp Shadow
University of Disaster
Video animations courtesy of Priska Pasquer, Cologne and Galerie Christine König Vienna.
Radenko Milak is an artist who makes of the Image the very matter of his creation. The majority of his work consists in the creation of paintings, watercolors, drawings, collages and animation films that often come in series. His series can be political and historical, as with "University of Disaster," "365 - Image of Time," "So close and yet so far;" inspired by cinema, as with "Endless Movie" or science with "Dark Matter." Each series, through the game of associations between the images created, becomes a story, a narrative machine. Radenko Milak has developed the very singular technique of black and white watercolor that allows him to get to the very essence of an image and to deploy an aesthetic language that is profoundly unique. He attaches great importance to how the digital age radically transforms our lives, our perception of the world, the very meaning of artistic creation. For each work, he conducts extensive and meticulous research that leads him to collect images that come from multiple sources of archives. He uses the results of his research as raw material that he manipulates through a process of appropriation and transformation. He thinks of his works as installations that put into play the symbolic power of images, their aesthetic potential, in an epoch when they are gradually replacing articulated languages and when their production has gotten out of control with the coming of the digital age. Hundreds of thousands of images are produced every second. A camera can capture one thousand billion images in a single second. Radenko Milak shares the hypothesis that images are about to become to consciousness and human memory as “Dark Matter” is to Physics: a mysterious mass, unknown, undetectable, yet constituting what is essential in matter. Radenko Milak works Images like the Dark Matter of individual and collective memories. In this sense, his artistic practice corresponds quite precisely to Aby Warburg’s definition of art: “art is the act of reproducing a mnemonic image of the social organism”. In a visually saturated society, images are called on to become the major unthought, the malediction of consciences. It is at this precise place that Radenko Milak's creations can have their say; they can help us to reflect on the Image or the images by creating relationships necessary to their general perception as social, political, but also aesthetic fact.
Radenko Milak creates animation films directly on paper, in black and white. He started with simple and mysterious loops in parallel with his paintings. In 2017, For the project « University of Disaster » presented at the Venice Biennale, he created his first animation movie, entitled, “From the Far Side of the Moon”. This film literally places us in movement in a succession of sequences where all linear narration disappears, replaced by a circular narrative within which the darkening over to black becomes the metaphor for what cannot be seen, because unrepresentable, in other words, beyond our human mesure, our imagination. We see sections of landscapes in which the natural movements of water, air, smoke, plants or living creatures flow one after another. Other shots depict human beings and the mechanical rhythms of man-made machines. Fragments of an interview with Robert Oppenheimer support the underlying dramatic composition up to its somber and poetic climax. “From the Far Side of the Moon” is a film that plays with the symbolic perceptions of opposites, opposed and reconciled – the masculine and the feminine, the moon and the sun, the light and the dark, absence and presence, the far and the close – and brings us back to this mysterious couple, desire and disaster, that we could resume with a chiasm: desire for disaster and disaster of desire. The film can be seen as the metaphor for a journey of memory, one that would go from a catastrophe to another, these never appearing in a literal sense, but more often suggested or metaphorical.
Radenko Milak created a second animation film, entitled « Dreaming of Prey to Grasp Shadow » for the 2018 Kampala Art Biennale. This biennale invited seven artists, including Radenko Milak, to open their studios, inviting young artists to produce art works in collaboration with each of their seven emasters ».
« Dreaming of Prey to Grasp Shadow » was created in the Kampala studio, with the young artist, Ocom Adonias, as assistant. The film is the metaphor for a voyage in time in which the contemporary figure of the migrant is grasped as much in the memories of the colonization of the African continent as through the tragic odysseys of these contemporary heroes and adventurers who risk their lives to reach European coasts. In parallel, the artist makes childhood and the innocence of children's games one of the keys of the film. "Dreaming of Prey to Grasp Shadow" is the story of the tragic poetry of displacement and of the trek for survival.
Christopher Yggdre
Radenko Milak, born in Yugoslavia in 1980, lives and works in Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina). After studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Art in Belgrade, he created and managed from 2008 to 2010 Spa Port, an international contemporary art exhibition. As of 2010, he dedicated himself full time to his artistic practice and created works prolifically, mainly paintings, watercolors, drawings and animation films. He defines himself as a painter of the digital era. These works, which tend to follow the principle of the series, have been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the world, during Art Biennales as well as in Museums or Art Centers or Galleries. Radenko Milak makes of the Image the very matter of his creation. He thinks of his works as installations that put into play the symbolic power of images, their aesthetic potential, in a epoch when they are gradually replacing articulated languages and when their production has gotten out of control with the coming of the digital age. His works are very often exhibited in Europe, more particularly in France and Germany, where they are present in several public art collections such as the Folkwang Museum. In 2017, he was the artist invited for the 57th Venice Biennale to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina. He invested the Pavilion with a conceptual exhibition entitled “University of Disaster.” In 2018, he will be presenting several solo shows and is invited to several international Biennales including the third edition of the Kampala Biennale (Uganda) and the 57th edition of the October Salon in Belgrade (Serbia).
Radenko Milak’s painting work centers on questions relating to how visual elements are fixed and stored both in personal memories and as presented in the media of film and photography. Indeed, his practice as an artist has always been heavily influenced by the idea that our relationship to the world and its history is largely determined by the uninterrupted and continuous flow of images that documents the world. His very singular technique – using black ink watercolor on a white surface – allows him to reach the very essence of an image and to use an aesthetic language that is profoundly unique. Finding his material in print media – such as photojournalism, old newspapers, and postcards – and on the Internet as well, Radenko Milak creates his watercolors and oil paintings by using a black pigment on a white surface as a tool to transform templates from films, reports or press images and other propaganda archives into small intimate artistic scenarios.The results of his research become the materials that he manipulates through a process of appropriation and transformation.
Photo:: Luci Lux.
Christopher Yggdre
A cultural entrepreneur, Christopher Yggdre is also an author, curator, screenwriter and director. One of the founders of the magazine Les Périphériques vous parlent, he was a member of the art collective Génération Chaos from 1993 to 2001. In 2003, he created Co-errances, one of the first cooperative collectives in France active in the field of cultural dissemination. In 2009, he created the Fonds de Dotation Agnès b., which he oversaw until 2012. This organization has a threefold vocation of cultural, humanitarian, and environmental patronage. In 2014, Christopher created L’Agence à Paris, which advises and supports artists of all disciplines as well as public and private venues devoted to arts and culture. He is the curator and producer of several exhibitions including University of Disaster for the Pavilion of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the 2017 Venice Biennial, featuring guest artist Radenko Milak. Since October 2020, he is the curator and artistic director of the Foundation LAccolade - Institut de France.