Milka Delibašić: Beautiful Silence
April 14th - May 8th 2023
With the exhibition "Beautiful Silence", Milka Delibašić successfully combines various aspects of her artistic practice – visual arts, performance and technology. The starting point of the exhibition is the need for a moment of silence and the conditions it causes, because silence is never completely peaceful. In the silence, many conditions appear that remain hidden in the noise of everyday life. Silence forces us to listen to what is inside us. Working intuitively based on instinct and process, Milka Delibašić often uses past experiences in her works, either personal or someone else's - often traumatic. These become the basis for further, deeply procedural work that often takes its final form in ambiental installation. In this construction made up of numerous screens, the motif of the body prevails. The body as such in Milka's works is not a symbol, nor is it a subject. Rather, it is a means of expressing inner states, since the experience of that body belongs to everyone. The body possesses exceptional performative potential and it is often her own body with which, like any other artistic means, she creates personal poetics, paying special attention to the feeling of the body's movement through space.
Faced with silence, inner states are manifested by movements in an undefined space in which she places her own body. Through manipulation of the image, the artist brings it to the limits of abstraction. Emotions form aestheticized movements. The body thus becomes a medium for expressing inner realities. Its vague, blurred contours are completely reduced to emotion. In contrast to these videos in an undefined space, the central work clearly shows a location dominated by the element of water, a symbol of cleansing and new life - perseverance and overcoming. As an antithesis to expressive shots, entering the water represents calmness and evokes the transformation that only happens through extreme presence.
Although in her work she often refers to the relationship between images and media, with this exhibition Milka remains at the intuitive and sensory level without encroaching on theoretical frameworks. While in some of her previous works (To Whom My Dreams Belong) she uses screens to evoke fragments of memory, here they show the layerings of the evoked emotion. This abundance of digital imagery that constantly surrounds us along with the focus on the visual and external are interests that occupy her. She was also greatly influenced by her stay in China, where she spent several years until 2020. The omnipresence of images that we have become so accustomed to are hyper potent in this exhibition. External visuality is used to present what is inside.
The setup of the exhibition destabilizes the space by introducing the virtual into the physical. The numerous screens that make up the ambiental video installation communicate with and build on each other. In this way, she creates a landscape composed of several levels of space - the space of the body in the video, the space of the screen, and the physical space of the gallery where they are located. In this exhibition, she adds another dimension - the mirror floor where the images continue to multiply. In this way, it destroys the basic assumptions of static space and even temporality. The visitor becomes an integral part of that landscape, and participates in it through immersion in emotion. With their movements, their reflection, and even their very presence and observation, the visitor becomes an actor in the installation. Individual feeling thus becomes the point of contact - the basis for identification and sympathy.
Milka Delibašić (Nikšić, 1989) works in different artistic media such as drawings, video installations and performances. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, study program in Graphics. She completed her master's degree in Spatial - Multimedia Art at the Faculty of Intermedia at the Chinese Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, China. She represented Montenegro at the Youth Biennale Mediterranea 17 in Milan (2015). She is the winner of the "Petar Lubarda" state award (2018) and a finalist of the "Milčik" award for young visual artists in Montenegro (2021). She participated in numerous workshops and group exhibitions in Montenegro and abroad.
The exhibition is part of the "Spaces of Empowerment" program that the "Culture Hub Croatia" Platform is implementing in 2023 as part of the Prostor creative hub. The exhibition is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia. 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.
Special thanks: HULU, QueerANarchive and Mavena.
Curator: Jasmina Šarić
Technical Setup: Milka Delibašić, Marino Vukasović
