MILICA DENKOVIĆ
DYSMENORRHEA DIARIES
July 5th - August 1st 2025
exhibition opening: Saturday, July 5th at 8PM
Pain always has a specific language, whether it is a cry, a sob, or a tensing of the features, and it is a language in itself as well.” (1)
Interested in the phenomenology of menstrual pain and inspired by her own experience of living with chronic pain, Milica Denković develops the project “Dysmenorrhea Diaries”, with which she questions the understanding of pain as a personalized, immeasurable and unshareable experience, but also pain as a female heritage. The exhibition consists of three interconnected parts, the first of which presents a series of installations composed of various, often piled up, objects, that together form the bedroom. The installation is dominated by the color red - the color of pain, but also of strength. It is an intentional choice made by a member of the generation that grew up with advertisements for sanitary pads with blue liquid. Where does this fear of the color red come from? And while some minimal progress is visible in this regard, menstruation is, in general, still a taboo, and the pain associated with it is too often denied, ignored or neglected.
Menstrual pain here also serves as a metaphor for the illnesses that affect women, and the way they are diagnosed and treated. In addition to the fact that medical research is largely based on men, the healthcare providers and the healthcare system are failing women in their responses to and treatment of women’s pain, especially chronic pain. Women are more likely to be offered minor tranquilizers and antidepressants than analgesic pain medication. Women are less likely to be referred for further diagnostic investigations than men are. And women’s pain is much more likely to be seen as having an emotional or a psychological cause, rather than a bodily or biological one. Women are the predominant sufferers of chronic diseases that begin with pain. But before our pain is taken seriously as a symptom of a possible disease, it first has to be validated — and believed—by a medical professional. And this pervasive aura of distrust around women’s accounts of their pain has been enfolded into medical attitudes over centuries. Prevailing social stereotypes about the way women experience, express, and tolerate pain are not modern phenomena — they have been ingrained across medicine’s history. Our contemporary biomedical knowledge is stained with the residue of old stories, fallacies, assumptions, and myths. (2)
Milica Denković translates her own experience of dysmenorrhea and chronic colitis into poetry as a way of coping with pain, or channeling it. The installations are therefore created with the idea of how to objectify poetry. There are four poems in the “room”, each of which is linked to a specific object(s). Menarche talks about the first menstruation and the discovery of the pain. Since she got her period when she was 11 (at the same age that she began writing poetry), she presents this poem in an installation that depicts a kid’s birthday as a symbol of the transition from childhood to adulthood. The red dress as the central object embodies the poem of the same title, which objectifies pain through a red dress tailored for an eleven-year-old girl and the feeling of discomfort that it represents for the artist today, being an adult woman. It also symbolizes the concept of masking pain in public, and raises questions about the fashion and comfort of clothing for women and people who experience severe pain. The short poem Avalanche describes the experience of severe menstrual pain that can last for several hours. This pain is represented as a mountain of pillows, accompanied with sheets, blankets, pain management devices, and a wall clock. There is also a notebook and a pencil, symbols of the artist’s use of writing poetry as a pain management technique. Finally, the short poem Recipe hidden in the nightstand speaks of poetry as a painkiller and the time needed to write it, which is actually time spent in pain. It is represented with the nightstand, painkillers, tea, common everyday products that she uses to relieve nausea and pain. Each of these installations calls for micro-interaction, with messages resembling Alice in Wonderland’s instructions for navigating the strange world she entered, which adds the playfulness to this scenography as a whole. All of them together represent the room as a space in which pain is experienced, where we allow it to be felt, or where it is hidden within four walls.
The counterpart to poetry installation is a series of photographs on the topic of PMS and food cravings. The photographs, intentionally highly aestheticized, represent various cocktails into which the artist translates pain, but also the cravings for certain drinks and foods, or pleasure, as a counterbalance to pain. Elaine Scarry, in her scientific monograph “The Body of Pain”, argues that the experience of pain is unsharable because it is a private, subjective event that does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it. (3) However, Milica Denković not only talks about pain by successfully mixing various artistic forms, she also encourages others to share their own experiences. Therefore, in the last, participatory part of the exhibition, the artist invites visitors to summarize their experience or knowledge about menstruation or severe pain and to write it on a shower curtain with invisible UV markers. The text becomes visible only when the UV lamp is turned on. This work, called “Under the Surface”, embodies the silence and the unspoken in the public discourse about menstruation and menstrual pain.
- Jasmina Šarić
(1) Roselyn Rey, The History of Pain. Paris: Palais de la Decouverte, 1993.
(2) Adapted from Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn (2021) and article Gender Medicine History
(3) Scarry E., The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Milica Denković completed her Master's degree in New Visual Media at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. From 2018 to 2022, she collaborated with the Swedish cultural organization Kultivera as an independent artist on the international art project Letters, experimental art workshops and exhibitions. She is also active as a poet. Her poetic video work Astronaut/2x2m was shown in 2021/2022 at more than 25 video and short film festivals around the world. Her poetry is included on the LP “Poezija je mrtva” by the international punk'n'poetry band Unbearable error. She is a member of the informal Rijeka poetry collective Poetkult and the Croatian Association of Interdisciplinary Artists.
The exhibition is organized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City of Split. The work of the Platform "Culture Hub Croatia" is supported by the National Foundation for the Development of Civil Society and the Kultura Nova Foundation.
